Daniel de Blieck

Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 24 April 1998, lot 77;
There purchased by the present collector.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This panel is made from three pieces of oak joined vertically on the right and the left. These joins have received oak battens on the reverse and the joins are stable. The panel is flat and the paint layer is well adhered to the panel. The condition generally is extremely respectable. The paint layer is quite dirty and will respond well to cleaning. In the curtain in the upper right some discoloration and deterioration of the glazes may have occurred and slight abrasion is visible in the metal bars between the columns. In general however the condition seems to be very robust and although a few retouches will most likely be required to the un-restored joins in the panel and to a few other blemishes, a great deal of retouching should not be necessary.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Records of de Blieck's birthdate are lost and nothing is known about his early training.  His later life, however, is slightly better documented; he entered the guild in Middelburg in 1647-48 as an architect, and his earliest known paintings of church interiors date from 1650. Although it might seem that living and working in Zeeland would have isolated him to some extent from the architectural painters then working in Delft, Rotterdam, and Haarlem, De Blieck appears to have been aware of the latest developments in the genre.¹ He painted both real and imaginary church views, with his earliest known representation of a real church interior being a large panel dated 1652 of the Laurenskerk, Rotterdam.² The location depicted in the present painting had not previously been securely identified; however, a note in the photographic archives of the RKD, The Hague suggests that this painting depicts the interior of the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht.³  Dr. Walter A. Liedtke, who has seen the present painting firsthand, supports this identification.

1.  See W. Liedtke in, Inaugural Exhibition of Old Master Paintings, Otto Naumann, Ltd., New York 1995, p. 93, under cat. no. 19.
2.  Ibid, pp. 93-4, cat. no. 19, reproduced.
3.  See Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, photographic archives, image 43903.