Interior of a Protestant Gothic church with motifs of the Oude and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam

This 1677 panel by Emanuel de Witte, held by the Rijksmuseum, is an explicitly composite work: its title declares that it combines architectural motifs drawn from both the Oude Kerk and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. By the late 1670s De Witte had spent over two decades painting Amsterdam's churches and had accumulated a vocabulary of architectural fragments — columns, tracery patterns, tomb monuments, window forms — that he could recombine freely. This compositional freedom was not considered deceptive; collectors understood that church interiors by De Witte were interpretive works that distilled the character of Dutch Reformed sacred space rather than topographic records. The synthesis visible in this work represents the mature expression of an approach to architectural painting that treated the Gothic interior as a genre with its own conventions, as available for imaginative elaboration as the Arcadian landscape or the domestic interior.

On panel, the work integrates recognisable architectural elements from two distinct buildings into a coherent spatial whole. The draftsmanship is assured, the perspectival construction convincing despite the composite origin of its elements. Light and shadow are coordinated to unify the assembled motifs into a legible and harmonious interior.