Vakmanschap en comfort

Abstract

In a double-width building in the historical centre of Haarlem a classicist painted ceiling from the second quarter of the seventeenth century was recently discovered. It is a beam and joist construction in which the beam bays have been smoothly finished, resulting in a panelled ceiling. The areas between the beams boast a painted architectural division into coffers and panels, enriched with bundles of twigs and floral bouquets, festoons, gilded rosettes and two family coats of arms. The ceiling, which has been dated to between 1635 and 1639, was commissioned by Josephus Coymans and his wife Dorothea Berck. Ten years earlier, the Coymans family had been among the earliest patrons of Dutch classicism in Amsterdam when they commissioned Jacob van Campen to design the front facade of the Coymanshuis (1625). In Haarlem a classicist decoration programme, developed specifically for use in a genteel bourgeois domestic interior, was designed for the Coymans’ Groot Salet (large drawing room). It is the earliest known example of such decoration in Haarlem. The influence of both Sebastiano Serlio and Vincenzo Scamozzi is evident in the design and in the stylistic features of the ceiling. The latter is characterized by a highly effective and painterly application of perspective and shadowing on the flat surface. As such, the decorative programme differs fundamentally from the interior decoration of richly decorated coffered ceilings like the ones used by Jacob van Campen in the grand mansions and residences he designed from the 1630s onwards. By contrast, this ceiling exhibits striking similarities in concept and stylistic execution with the classicist decoration programme for the Vredenburg country house designed in 1639 by the Haarlem painter-architect Pieter Post. At Vredenburg Post demonstrated his mastery of the classic idiom and effectively succeeded in adapting the classicist decoration programme to a genteel bourgeois domestic interior. On the basis of the similarities, the ceiling in Haarlem has also been attributed to Pieter Post. However, the more mature, more elaborate design for Vredenburg must be located later on in the development of this type of interior decoration. With a dating of 1635-1639, the Groot Salet in Haarlem is the earliest known executed work by Pieter Post in Haarlem and must therefore be considered one of the earliest known classicist decoration programmes in a genteel bourgeois interior. This finding offers a firm basis for the dating of comparable discoveries and paintings, which until now has invariably been sought in the second half of the seventeenth century.