Jan van der Heyden

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Jan van der Heiden
Born	March 5, 1637 Gorinchem
Died	March 28, 1712 Amsterdam
Occupation	Artist, glass grinder
Spouse	Sarah Terhiel
Parents	Jan Goriszoon, Neeltje Jans Munster
Children	Jan, Samuel, Sarah

Jan van der Heyden was a Dutch Baroque era painter, draughtsman, printmaker and inventor who significantly contributed to contemporary firefighting. He improved the firehose (1672, with his brother Nicolaes, who was a hydraulic engineer), invented by Johann Hautsch,^[1] modified the manual fire engines, organised the first European volunteer fire brigade (1685) and wrote and illustrated the first firefighting manual (Brandspuiten-boek). A comprehensive street lighting scheme for Amsterdam, which lasted from 1669 until 1840, designed and implemented by Heiden, was adopted as a model by many other towns in the Netherlands and abroad.

He was a contemporary of the landscape painters Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael, with the advantage, which they lacked, of a certain professional versatility; for, whilst they painted admirable pictures and starved, he varied the practice of art with the study of mechanics. Jan van der Heyden, a mennonite also introduced the lamp post, and died in wealth as the superintendent of the lighting and director of the (voluntary) firemen's company at Amsterdam.

Till 1672 he painted in partnership with Adriaen van de Velde. After Adrian's death, and probably because of the loss which that event entailed upon him, he accepted the offices to which allusion has just been made. At no period of artistic activity had the system of division of labour been more fully or more constantly applied to art than it was in Holland towards the close of the 17th century.

Van der Heyden, who was perfect as an architectural draughtsman in so far as he painted the outside of buildings and thoroughly mastered linear perspective, seldom turned his hand to the delineation of any-thing but brick houses and churches in streets and squares, or rows along canals, or "moated granges," common in his native country.

He was a travelled man, had seen The Hague, Ghent and Brussels, and had ascended the Rhine past Xanten to Cologne, where he copied over and over again the tower and crane of the great cathedral. But he cared nothing for hill or vale, or stream or wood. He could reproduce the rows of bricks in a square of Dutch houses sparkling in the sun, or stunted trees and lines of dwellings varied by steeples, all in light or thrown into passing shadow by moving cloud.

He had the art of painting microscopically without loss of breadth or keeping. But he could draw neither man nor beast, nor ships nor carts; and this was his disadvantage. His good genius under these circumstances was Adrian van der Velde, who enlivened his compositions with spirited figures; and the joint labour of both is a delicate, minute, transparent work, radiant with glow and atmosphere.

Contents 1 Museums with van der Heyden's works 2 Exhibitions 3 References 4 Notes

[edit] Museums with van der Heyden's works

• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
• Musée du Louvre, Paris
• Amsterdams Historisch Museum, Amsterdam
• Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, The Hague
• Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
• National Gallery of Art, Washington
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Detroit Institute of Arts

[edit] Exhibitions

The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut, is presenting "Jan van der Heyden (1637 –1712)", an exhibition of works by the artist, from September 16, 2006, through January 10, 2007. The exhibit consists of 37 of the artist’s cityscape paintings and 16 drawings with supplemental material on Van der Heyden’s publication on firefighting. The exhibition is the first monographic exhibition of van der Heyden’s art to be mounted in 70 years and the first show ever in the United States, according to the museum. The exhibition will have its only showing in the United States at the Bruce Museum, after which it will travel (in slightly abridged form) to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.^[2]

[edit] References

• Jan van der Heyden (1637 - 1712) (exhibit catalogue) by Peter C. Sutton, et al., 50 illustrated pages, including 130 paintings, drawings and figures (Yale University Press: 2006). The book is the first publication on the artist in the English language, according to the Bruce Museum, where Sutton is director.
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] Notes