A View of the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft (1793): Art, History and Details

A View of the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft (1793) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Johannes Huibert Prins (Dutch, 1757–1806).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Johannes Huibert Prins made small-scale works on paper such as this drawing featuring scenes of Dutch cities and the people who inhabited them going about their everyday lives. In this drawing, the large Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in the city of Delft is shown from the side, while a matron fills a bucket for washing from the canal and laborers and other urban inhabitants cross the bridge beyond. Prins's technique, based on that of the artist Jan van der Heyden who worked about 100 years earlier, relied on minute detail—down to the mortar between each brick—achieved with astounding control of the ink and wash.

Object facts

• Title: A View of the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft
• Date: 1793
• Creator attribution: Johannes Huibert Prins (Dutch, 1757–1806)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Brush, point of brush and brown ink and wash with traces of graphite on cream medium-weight wove paper
• Dimensions: Image and Sheet: 29.8 x 32.8 cm (11 3/4 x 12 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Dutch
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2020.141

A detail from the museum

On the bridge a laborer pushes a heavy parcel on a wheelbarrow aided by a woman who pushes him from behind.

Collection credit

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Scallen, Catherine. "Holsteyn and Prins." In The Keithley Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art, edited by Heather Lemonedes Brown, 32-37, 44-45. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2022.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.