Cathedral Interior

This small atmospheric circular painting of a cathedral interior is signed by the Dutch Golden Age master Hendrick van Steenwijck and dated 1621. At this time Van Steenwijck was living in London, having moved to England from Antwerp around 1617. He soon attracted royal patronage, with at least a dozen of his works listed in the collection of Charles I.

The painting, which shows an imagined interior inspired by Antwerp Cathedral, first appears in an inventory at Ham House in 1683, but it had probably been acquired earlier by William Murray, 1st Earl of Dysart, the connoisseur and collector to whom Charles I had presented Ham as a gift in 1626. Murray transformed the house into a palatial home, complete with a cabinet room devoted entirely to his collection of miniatures and other small works of art.

After Murray’s death in 1655, his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale, continued the work of enhancing the house and its collections. Her inventory of 1683 lists ‘A perspective ofStanewick [sic]’, valued at £10, which is most likely this cathedral interior. It appears again in inventories of 1844 and 1911, and in a photograph of the cabinet room, or Green Closet, published in Country Life in 1920.

The National Trust acquired Ham in 1948, and has since worked to return the appearance of the house to its 17th-century heyday, complete with works of art and furnishings. The Green Closet is now regarded as a unique survival from this time, and there turn of this painting makes it the only place in the UK where a picture by this artist can be seen in the kind of space for which it was originally intended.