Pieter Jansz. Saenredam

(b. 1597, Assendelft, The Netherlands; d. 1665, Haarlem, The Netherlands) Dutch painter and draftsman. Pieter Jansz Saenredam moved to Haarlem with his mother at the age of ten after his father, an engraver, passed away. His father had invested in the successful Dutch East India Company and left his family with a decent fortune. In Haarlem, Saenredam became an apprentice to the painter Frans de Grebber. In 1623 he joined a Haarlem painters’ guild. From the beginning of his artistic career, Saenredam showed a deep interest in architectural subjects. Indeed, he is best known as a painter of structures and church interiors. Saenredam’s first known interior church drawing was of the Church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem. His paintings are meticulously executed with a great amount of attention paid to precise perspective and the complex geometry of the architecture. His fondness for depicting church interiors created a new genre of painting for his time, and is an example of a type of specialty painting that artists began to favor around 1600. Though Saenredam only produced a small body of paintings in his lifetime, he was also an excellent draftsman, and many of his architectural drawings still exist. Saenredam died in Haarlem, The Netherlands in 1665.