St Antony Gates in Amsterdam

The St Antony Gates (Sint Antoniesspoort) in Amsterdam were among the principal entry points to the medieval walled city, later incorporated into the urban fabric as the city expanded well beyond its medieval boundaries. Van der Heyden's 1660 Hermitage canvas documents the gates at a moment when they were already a relic of medieval Amsterdam surrounded by the rapidly developing seventeenth-century city. The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg held one of the world's great collections of Dutch Golden Age art, assembled primarily by Catherine the Great through large-scale purchases from European collections in the late eighteenth century. Van der Heyden's city view subjects were particularly well represented in Russian imperial collecting, and the St Petersburg holdings provided generations of Russian artists and scholars with direct access to the finest Dutch urban painting.

Oil on canvas, with van der Heyden rendering the medieval gate structure alongside the more recent architecture that surrounded it by 1660. The contrast between the rough-hewn medieval stonework of the gate and the refined brick of seventeenth-century Amsterdam buildings required him to deploy different surface vocabularies within the same composition. Canal water in the foreground provides the characteristic reflection that doubles and spatially extends the architectural scene.