The Andreas church in Dusseldorp

The Andreas Church (St Andrew's) in Düsseldorf was one of the Jesuit-built Baroque churches of the lower Rhine, and van der Heyden painted it during or after his documented travels through the German Rhineland in the 1660s. This 1667 panel was part of the celebrated collection of Willem V Prince of Orange-Nassau, which formed the nucleus of the Mauritshuis collection in The Hague — one of the most distinguished repositories of Dutch Golden Age painting. The inclusion of this German church in the Orange-Nassau collection reflects the political geography of the Dutch-German cultural sphere and the personal associations of the Orange family with the Rhine region. Van der Heyden's Rhineland church subjects were appreciated precisely because they documented buildings that were not routinely visible to Amsterdam collectors, providing a form of virtual travel in paint.

Oil on panel, with van der Heyden adapting his technique to the Baroque Jesuit architecture of the Andreas Church — a building whose curved, heavily ornamented facades required a different kind of precision from the severe Protestant brick churches of Amsterdam. The rounded forms of Baroque pilasters and the decorative articulation of the Jesuit style are rendered with the same patient observation he brought to Gothic tracery and Romanesque masonry.