View of the Church of the Holy Apostles, Cologne

Gerrit Berckheyde was the foremost specialist in townscape painting in late-seventeenth-century Holland, and this 1690 view of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Cologne testifies to the market for vedute of major German cities. Cologne's Romanesque churches, visible across the skyline from the Rhine, attracted Dutch and Flemish visitors and collectors throughout the period. Berckheyde had worked in Cologne and the Rhine region in the 1650s in company with his brother Job, and the city's architecture left a lasting mark on his repertoire. The painting documents the church's appearance before later alterations and stands as an important topographic record.

Berckheyde structures the view with the church facade as the dominant vertical element, flanked by lower civic buildings. Figures in the foreground street provide scale and period local colour. The light is the clear, even Dutch daylight he favoured — sharp shadows on the stonework, blue sky above.