Hi I'm Justine. I'm the Dorset Curatorial
Fellow here at the National Gallery and
today I'm asking the question: Why is
there graffiti in this church interior
and what does that tell us about the
ways artists use their imagination when
they're depicting everyday life?
Today we're focusing on the Buurkerk which
literally translates as the neighbourhood
church in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
Saenredam specialised in depicting the
lofty white churches that were
commonplace in the Netherlands at the
time.
Now when Saenredam
depicted a church, he really went for
it. He was completely obsessed with
capturing the churches that he visited
and he was really one of the first
artists who devoted himself to
accurately depicting real life buildings
and he would do this with
forensic levels of detail.
Not only would he make many drawings on
site, but he would also
painstakingly measure the buildings and
the churches and
it's just such a fun thing to imagine
this artist measuring the church. And
then years later he would take all these
drawings and these measurements and he
would work the drawings into paintings,
and in fact
this painting was based on a drawing
that he made eight years earlier during
a 20-week trip and to the city of
Utrecht. And when we look at his two
paintings here at the National Gallery
we can see how the bright, really clear,
light just fills his churches
and it dances off the walls and if we
inspect them really closely we can see
just how many colours he used to create
this illusion of white.
You know we can see endless tones and
shades of yellow and grey and brown and
this is all subtly blending into
something that we the viewer,
yeah we ultimately perceive it as white.
And then here
in the shadow in the foreground
of this
clean
white church that was so carefully
portrayed,
we see a boy defacing a pier with
graffiti
and another boy who's teaching a dog to
play tricks,
and it's not the first thing that you
notice maybe but once you've seen them
they really draw you in and you can't
help but be intrigued by what's going on
here in the corner.
The boy drawing is located just next to
Saenredam's signature, which is also
playfully written on the pier as if it
is also graffiti. If you look closely we
can see another inscription,
and this time it's scratched into the
wall again, it's very tiny. It says
"de buer kerck binne utrecht aldus geschildert int Jaer 1644 van
Pieter Saenredam.
And this means "The Buurkerk church
within Utrecht, thus painted in the year
1644
by Pieter Saenredam, and then above the
children
in the large niche in the pier we see a
representation of Moses with the tablets
of the law,
and these were the the stone tables on
which the ten commandments were written.
The boy on the right seems to have just
finished a drawing of a horse with four
figures on its back,
and nowadays to us this might not
instantly ring a bell,
but in fact it's a scene from a story
that was quite well known at the time. We
see the four sons of the duke of Aymon
who are fleeing from the Emperor
Charlemagne
on
the back of this legendary horse that
was called Bayard.
It was a french story originally, 13th
century, and it was quite popular.
Importantly it was published several
times in Dutch in
both the 16th and the 17th centuries.
So it was really
something that people would have
recognised. These details in the
foreground have sparked many questions
and interpretations amongst art
historians. Firstly it's unclear whether
Saenredam himself included these details.
The difference in style between the
children in the foreground and the
figures in the back
suggests that the boys may have been
painted by another artist.
And this could have been a direct
collaboration between Saenredam and this
other painter.
It wasn't uncommon at the time
for artists who had different
specialisms to join forces and to work
together to create something that was, in
a way, larger than the sum of its parts.
But it could have also been that a
different painter added these details
later in the 17th century and it's quite
difficult to know for sure.
Art historians have also pondered the
possible significance behind this group
of details,
and many interpretations have been
proposed but one compelling one is that
the group serves as a metaphor for
upbringing,
in the sense that all these details
allude to this topic.
The figures portrayed are all children,
so the boys and the four sons on the
horse, they're all still being raised
themselves.
Then
this boy is teaching the dog to sit up
and this very enchanting lovable motif
is seen fairly often in dutch art and it
has been
linked or associated with the idea of
child rearing in other instances as well.
The theme then continues with the four
sons on the horse
because this horse is notoriously
difficult to tame, it's almost untameable,
so again it taps into this idea of
teaching and training.
The depiction of Moses above their heads
could then be interpreted as adding
another layer to the metaphor with the
tablets of the law with the ten
commandments,
relating to religious instruction.
All this being said
formulating a definitive answer
as to a single underlying meaning,
if there even is one,
remains quite tricky hundreds of years
after the fact. You may wonder is this
something the artist could have observed
in real life.
Did people really draw on the walls in
churches and could you find dogs in
churches?
And the short answer is actually
yes.
Nowadays we don't really think of
churches as places where we can find
very many dogs,
but in fact
back then
the number of dogs, and especially stray
dogs, that would
slip into the building during the cold
winter months were a real cause for
concern. They would bark during services
and we know of churches where they would
employ a special functionary to keep the
dogs out.
As for the graffiti, not only are there
other paintings in which we can see
drawings on the wall,
there are also very many churches and
real life old buildings in which we can
find graffiti on the wall and scratched
into it and I really encourage you all
to keep an eye out for some if you find
yourself visiting a church.
The term graffiti is now often
associated with a more modern day style
of art, but the act of drawing and
writing on the walls and other surfaces
in the public realm, has been a staple of
cultural expression for thousands of
years.
Many surveys of the history of art will
start with the drawings that you can
find on the walls of caves and these
even predate the written word.
So graffiti was, is,
and likely always will be,
found everywhere.
17th century Dutch painting can
give the viewer this wonderful sense of
glimpsing into the world the artist
lived in.
Vermeer makes us feel as if we just
walked in on the woman behind the
virginal and Saenredam really lets us step
into these spaces that he so lovingly
studied,
and it's true that these paintings can
teach us about the way that the world
looked and the way it functioned and
about this lost past,
however,
we mustn't forget that these paintings
were created in the studio
and that they're
highly composed images.
Even Saenredam with his obsessive
measurements
vertically stretched the composition of
this church to create a taller and
lighter and more spacious building.
So these paintings they can have an
almost documentary feel
as if a moment in time has been captured
forever,
but in fact there's always a very strong
element of imagination and invention,
and the same is true for these boys here
in the foreground.
So personally,
I am just so happy that somebody thought
to include them, because they always make
me smile. If you're interested in
learning more about art history click
here or here and subscribe to our
YouTube channel. Thank you for watching
and see you next time.