VIEWS OF HAARLEM
The City Depicted in the Seventeenth Century
For centuries, Haarlem has been a much-loved subject for artists. Views with St Bavo’s Church on the horizon, the Grote Markt and other cityscapes enjoyed unprecedented popularity as early as the seventeenth century.
The Spanish siege in 1572-73, the occupation and the city fire of 1576 were followed by a period in which Haarlem saw its economy recover and its culture bloom. The city became a natural motif in the work of artists who pictured local history, while others were inspired by the stunning surroundings.
Jan van Goyen, who trained in Haarlem, was a pioneer in the genre; his panoramic views over Lake Haarlemmermeer extend to the silhouette of St Bavo’s Church on the horizon. He also drew and painted the city gates. In their turn the Haarlem-born Gerrit Berckheyde and Jacob van Ruisdael took a different view of their subjects – Berckheyde zoomed in while Ruisdael stood back. These two most important painters defined our perception of seventeenth-century Haarlem and surroundings. Berckheyde with his very characteristic cityscapes: the Grote Markt, with St Bavo’s Church or the Town Hall as eye-catcher, the Weigh House on the River Spaarne and the city gates. Ruisdael with his famous ‘Haerlempjes’ (Little Haarlems), where heavy cloudy skies dominate the landscape and the unmistakable St Bavo’s Church is on the horizon.
The exhibition Views of Haarlem and the book of the same name take us on a stroll from outside to inside: from Lake Haarlemmermeer, nearby villages and the edge of the dunes, via the River Spaarne and the city gates into the city, arriving in the Grote Markt, at St Bavo’s Church.
Jacob van Ruisdael and Gerrit Berckheyde also defined the image of Haarlem as a place on earth where everything was perfect. The weather is always lovely; the city is bathed in sunlight, with a familiar Dutch cloudy sky. Walkers enjoying the atmosphere, clean linen, raked streets and squares: images of harmony and cleanliness, where model citizens live – and there are no paupers. We see the nice face of the city and the surrounding landscape.
This was the perception of the city that the buyers of views of Haarlem preferred to see. The need for a rose-tinted reality was particularly welcome at a time of economic recession, when the city was in a much less flourishing position. Artists eagerly took advantage of this.
This positive image of Haarlem survives to this day. The Haarlem cityscapes of Ruisdael, Berckheyde, Van Goyen and others in museum and private collections are cherished for their artistic, topographical and narrative qualities.
This fine seventeenth-century vision of Haarlem invites us to make comparisons with the current city. Even though the city has expanded substantially, St Bavo’s Church still dominates the skyline. The people of Haarlem are proud of their city centre and the many visitors to this historic site imagine they are in a seventeenthcentury picture postcard.
But the city of now and the city of then are much more diversified than the beautiful pictures would have us believe. Growth and decline, wealth and poverty, peace and war, privileges and exploitation, luck and misfortune, cleaned up and polluted – the recto and the verso, two sides of every coin – equally determine the nature of the city. Haarlem, like all other cities, is currently faced with major challenges. The majority of our monuments are well looked after, but housing shortages, inequality and pollution are the tough reality. The climate and biodiversity are under unprecedented and - for the time being - unrelenting pressure. For centuries we have been effective custodians and have looked after the city and the art that features it well, but now we need to ensure that the city and the surrounding land and water remain inhabitable for future generations of people, fauna and flora.
Samuel Ampzing described Haarlem as an earthly paradise – an ‘old city, born a thousand years ago’:
Old, populous, well-built, full-timbered, well-situated, In the middle of the country, on pleasant paths. On fields, on woodlands, on dunes, on lakes, on the sea, Truly a paradise, and a perfect spot.
I hope wholeheartedly that in a hundred, or better yet a thousand, years, residents and visitors will still be able to look at and embrace this ‘perfect city’!
Lidewij de Koekkoek Director, Frans Hals Museum
At the very end of the sixteenth century Haarlem was a city under reconstruction. The traces of the siege by Spanish troops in 1572-73 and the subsequent occupation, and the scars of the devastation caused by the major city fire of 1576, had slowly but surely been eradicated by construction projects large and small. The city walls and city gates were restored, public buildings were extended or newly built. Haarlemmerhout woods to the south of the city, whose trees had been cleared during the siege to create space for an enemy army camp and for firewood, were replanted in phases. The reconstruction went beyond just the physical city. Brewing, the most important commercial activity in medieval Haarlem, revived and embarked on its final heyday. The textile industry, traditionally also a cornerstone of the local economy, benefitted from the many immigrants who fled to towns and cities in Holland, particularly from Flanders and Brabant.
This economic ‘miracle’ was described at length in the poems of Karel van Mander and Samuel Ampzing. Both authors refer to Haarlem’s favourable position. The surrounding countryside supplied food and served urban commerce and industry, the sea was only a few miles away and the River Spaarne, a traffic artery between Lake Haarlemmermeer and the IJ, was a natural north-south link (fig. 1). They also focus in detail on Haarlem’s rich history from its foundation to their own time and the virtues of its residents, while not forgetting the quality and beauty of the most important buildings – as was customary at the time when describing cities. Their writings represent the overture to the advent and blossoming of the Haarlem cityscape in the seventeenth century.
Cultural life in Haarlem flourished again in the years immediately before 1600. The major trendsetter in this field was without doubt the painter, writer, poet and art theoretician Karel van Mander (fig. 2). Flemish by birth, after wanderings through Europe, in 1583 he settled in Haarlem, where he inspired such artists as Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem with his experiences during his travels. He devoted his energies to painting and to writing prose and poetry. His best-known publication is his 1604 Schilder-Boeck, an instruction book for young painters. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Van Mander wrote two odes: ’t Stadt Haerlems Beeldt and Het beelt van Haerlem. The first was headed by a view of the city from the north, one of the oldest surviving ‘profiles’ of Haarlem (fig. 3). As is
usual in this literary genre, the focus is on the city’s excellence, in the broadest sense of the word. Van Mander describes the legendary foundation of Haarlem and its later history, and sings the praises of the residents’ virtues and courage when they endured the Spanish siege of the city for no less than seven months. He also dwells at length on Haarlem’s favourable location, which was, after all, the basis for the city’s prosperity. He applauds the proximity of the sea with its plentiful fish, the dunes, where residents could hunt to their hearts’ content, and the bleacheries, where the white linen contrasted strikingly with the green fields:
Long, wide and broad, where the dunes appear, There rabbits run like the ants in the grass, Yes, harts and hinds, in all the seasons, In short, the hunter finds what he desires, With which he can treat the burgher. And there lies the bleached cloth that adorns the whole Clean white spread out, and green in places, too, Which is cheerful to see in every way: It can please the eye and cheer the heart.1
He goes on to show his appreciation for the fields of wheat and the orchards to the north as well as Lake Haarlemmermeer and the peatlands to the south. Yet despite the economically inspired character of some verses, Van Mander does not fail to point out that the Haarlemmerhout woods on the road to Leiden are well worth visiting by young and old alike:
And South of the city is the road one takes to Leiden
Beside the green fields is Haarlem’s forest, Where young and old may relax, Stroll, walk, in solitude here and there, Spread out in the green to gladden the spirit; Eat, drink, play, read, sing unafraid, Driving a tempest of sadness to flight. It seems to be a real fairground there: Man must sometimes air himself – like a carpet.2
As for Van Mander himself, he preferred to climb the hill that gave him a view of his adopted home city. In his collection of poems Den Nederduytschen Helicon, published in 1610, he compares the Greek Mount Helicon, where the mythological Nine Muses lived, with the ‘Witten Blinck’, or the Blinkert, the large bare-topped dune to the west of the city, behind the present-day Kraantje Lek pancake restaurant.
2 Nicolaes Lastman (1585-1625) after Jan Saenredam (1565-1607), Portrait of Karel van Mander (1548-1606), 1604. Engraving, 19.8 x 13.5 cm. Haarlem, Noord-Hollands Archief
So where will I travel if I think well about it? Henceforth my Helicon is just the Witten Blinck. This land, where reason reigns so moderately and modestly: What could lead my inclination anywhere else?3
Despite having travelled far and wide, as far as the immigrant Van Mander was concerned, what counted in the end was the inspiration he found close to home – the view from atop a tall dune of Haarlem, where reason and common sense prevailed.
The earliest cityscapes of Haarlem are history or news prints with panoramas and skylines from the last thirty years of the sixteenth century. During the period after the Spanish siege in 1572-73 the city is generally depicted in bird’s eye views from the north, because that was where the besiegers had their primary positions and their headquarters. The 1573 print by Maarten van Heemskerck is a good illustration (fig. 4). Thereafter it became standard practice to depict the city from the north, as in a monumental drawing by Thomas Thomasz (fig. 5).
This remarkably large and detailed composition shows the skyline of Haarlem on the right seen from a high point close to Huis ter Kleef Castle, which housed the two-man Spanish high command during the siege in 1572-73. Lake Haarlemmermeer can be seen on the left behind the city, and on the far left there is even the skyline of Amsterdam. Aside from the format and the degree of detail, what makes the drawing exceptional are the many notes, which contain all kinds
of historical and anecdotal information as well as the identification of the buildings in the besieged city. The notes tell us, for example, that Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo (referred to in Dutch as Don Frederik) had his accommodation in the main building of Huis ter Kleef Castle, right. And that Julián Romero de Ibarrola (referred to in Dutch as Julian or Julio de Romero) had his quarters in the gatehouse. To the left of these buildings are tents and temporary thatch-roofed wooden huts, which housed the regular troops and the sutlers. These were women, usually married to soldiers, who followed the army wherever it went and were entitled to sell the troops drink, food and other necessities.
Thomas Thomasz is best known for the city map he drew in 1578, which was published in 1590 on the instructions of the city authorities (fig. 6). The map shows the dramatic, deep scars on the urban landscape left behind by the siege and the huge city fire of 1576. A smaller version of this map was included in Samuel
Ampzing’s 1628 book Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem in Holland, which is discussed below. Thomasz was a gold- and silversmith by trade. He belonged to the Haarlem urban elite; he was a member of Haarlem city council between 1583 and 1603 and held the office of burgomaster a number of times. He also held positions in the national government as a representative of Haarlem, for example in the States General.
The undated monumental drawing of the siege of Haarlem prompts the question as to when Thomasz can have produced it. The possibility that he could have done it during the siege itself can be essentially ruled out because he would without doubt have paid for it with his life. At the end of the siege in 1573, Don Frederik had Huis Ter Kleef Castle blown up in order to prevent the Geuzen from taking it over. Geuzen, derived from the French word Gueux (Beggars), was the name given to a confederacy of Dutch nobles and soldiers opposing Spanish rule in the Netherlands After the city fire, the people of Haarlem demolished part of the damaged castle and used the bricks to rebuild the city, leaving nothing but a ruin (see fig. 20). He used the past tense to describe where Don Frederik and Romero had stayed, which suggests that the drawing was made in around 1578-80. This also explains the rather ghostly atmosphere that the desolate camp conjures up because of the absence of soldiers and any military activities whatsoever. It is possible that Thomasz based this work in part on a drawing made before the siege.
More than forty years later, in 1621, Pieter de Molijn drew a comparable view of the city from a virtually identical location. The drawing was used by the Haarlem engraver Jan van de Velde II to make a print (fig. 7). This composite depiction, on three sheets, is no less monumental that Thomasz’s drawing. But one can also identify clearly visible and striking differences. On the left, for instance, Huis Ter Kleef Castle is shown in a ruinous condition. Apart from that, there is no longer any trace of the scars on the walls and gates that recall the siege or the fire. De Molijn showed the city at its most beautiful, surrounded by luxuriant greenery. The foreground is populated by fashionably dressed figures on foot, on horseback or in a gig; carts loaded with goods are on their way to or from the city. In particular, however, there are cattle, some with a herdsman and some without. The grazing cows indicate the succulent meadows near Haarlem, a recurring element in the odes to the city. Pieter de Molijn depicted himself in the middle foreground, seated on the ground with his sketchbook on his knees. There are numbers above the different identifiable city buildings which refer to the legend lower left that contains their names. It is interesting to note that in the midst of such urban splendours as churches, city gates, former monasteries and care institutions, there are two breweries. This makes one wonder whether the owners of these breweries might have played a role in the production of this print, or indeed may even have been the principals. Unfortunately nothing is known about this.
Above the skyline are three allegorical scenes and various coats of arms. From left to right these are Haarlem’s coat of arms held by two sea monsters – presumably personifications of the River Spaarne; Holland’s coat of arms and a woman seated on the winged horse Pegasus, the muse of poetry or history; in the centre one sees Haarlem’s mythical old coat of arms, with the barren branches of a tree, with Haarlem’s other ‘new’ coats of arms on the trunk, placed in a boat with a saw on the prow – attributes that refer to the legendary conquest of Damietta by men from Haarlem (see p. 22-23). In the branches hang the coats of arms of a number of Haarlem families that were supposedly involved in the conquest of Damietta. To the right is a woman wearing a helmet, seated on a lion and holding a broken column, the personification of strength or steadfastness. Next to her is the coat of arms of stadholder Prince Maurice and, finally, Haarlem’s old coat of arms held by two wild men.
In the bottom right-hand corner is a cartouche with a rhyming ode in Latin praising the city administration. The cartouche is surrounded by weapons of war, indicating the siege, and attributes associated with the branches of industry that contributed to the economic and cultural blossoming of the city.
Industry and prosperity are also depicted implicitly in the many clouds of smoke above the parts of the city on the River Spaarne, where the breweries were located. The print expresses feelings of pride in the city, with its centuries-old history and its location in idyllic surroundings. A city that above all had overcome the disasters and setbacks in its recent past and had become prosperous thanks to the steadfastness, strength and industry of its courageous and virtuous residents. In other words, the impressive composition by De Molijn and Van de Velde can be considered a combination of a visual ode and a continuation – in peacetime – of the tradition of history prints with a view of the city from the north.
The 520-page Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem in Holland by Samuel Ampzing was published in 1628. In his book, the Haarlem preacher, poet and historian, whose portrait was painted by Frans Hals (fig. 8), follows the example of authors who had sung the praises of neighbouring cities, for example Amsterdam and Leiden. Haarlem simply could not be left behind. The major difference with older odes by Van Mander and Ampzing himself lay, apart from the size, in the choice of a mixture of prose and poetry and the presence of a large number of illustrations. The eighteen prints in the book, most of them based on designs by Pieter Saenredam, give a comprehensive picture of the city: from distant views and the ruins in the vicinity to the buildings in the Grote Markt and the interior of the Great or St Bavo’s Church. Ampzing will be extensively quoted below because of the far-reaching influence of his book on the perceptions of Haarlem during the seventeenth century and the exemplary role of the prints.4
In the depiction of the city from the northeast, Ampzing expresses the contemplation of the three gentlemen on the left by the river bank (fig. 9). One of them is drawing their view while another stares into the distance and sighs:
See here an old city, born a thousand years ago, And more than that another hundred years before. It was Knight Lem, as people mostly said, Or rather the House of Haarlem that laid out its estate here.
How many fine churches! How many high towers! How many lovely houses! Rightly chosen in days of yore, For her adornments and fame, for her virtue, and glory, And the fine setting of our Town Hall!
9
Jan van de Velde II (1593-1641) after Pieter Saenredam (1597-1665), Haarlem from the Northeast. Engraving, 17 x 25 cm. From Samuel Ampzing, Beschrijvinge ende Lof der Stadt Haerlem, 1628. Haarlem, Noord-Hollands Archief
