Samuel van Hoogstraten was one of Rembrandt’s most innovative pupils, and his most sought-after works today are his remarkable trompe l’oeils, including this superb example, which reflect his profound fascination with perspective and optical illusion.

As well as an accomplished painter, Hoogstraten was the author of The Introduction to the Academy of Painting, or the Visible World (or Inleyding tot de hooge schoole derschilderkonst: anders de zichtbaere werelt, Rotterdam, 1678), one of the most ambitious treatises on the art of painting published in the Dutch Republic in the 17th Century. It covers subjects ranging from pictorial persuasion and illusionism to the painter’s moral standards and the relation of painting to philosophy. Hoogstraten defined all painting as ‘a mirror of Nature, making things appear to be that are not, and deceiving in a permissible, delightful and commendable way’. He succeeded in this aim at the court of the Emperor Ferdinand III in Vienna, during a tour of Europe in August 1651: we are told that, when the emperor saw one of his still-life paintings, he remarked that Hoogstraten was ‘the first painter who has cheated me!’ (see A. Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, Amsterdam, 1718, vol. II, pp. 157-58). And Hoogstraten’s Perspective Box, or Peepshow, led the contemporary diarist John Evelyn to comment that it ‘shew’d me a prety Perspective & well represented in a triangular Box, the greate Church at Harlem in Holland, to be seene thro a small hole at one of the Corners, & contrived into a hansome Cabinet. It was so rarely don, that all the Artists and Painters in Towne, came flocking to see & admire it.’

The peepshow was a short-lived phenomenon in the Netherlands in the 17th Century, and is an aspect of Dutch artists’ fascination with perspectival and optical devices. Experiments of this sort and instructional performances played an important part in the lessons given by Hoogstraten after his return to Dordrecht in the 1650s. When Hoogstraten later lived in London between 1662-67, his work was much in demand, and five pictures are known to have survived from this period, including the present example. Given London’s central position in the Scientific Revolution, it is no coincidence that Hoogstraten’s experiments with optics were met with enthusiasm by the English cognoscenti. It is worth considering how such paintings were intended to be hung. The Dyrham Park View through a House now hangs at the end of a corridor, drawing the eye through a succession of rooms to give the illusion that the space is much longer than it measures. However, we know from Pepys’s contemporary description, recorded when he saw the work at Povey’s London house, that this was not originally the case, and in fact it hung in a ‘closet’ and was viewed through an open door. A further clue can be found in Arnold Houbraken’s biography of his teacher, in which he notes that Hoogstraten’s work consisted mainly of portraits, histories, and ‘perspectives in rooms [perspektiven in Kamers] which were seen from outside through a hole made in their rooms [perspektiven in Kamers] which were seen from outside through a hole made in the wall’ (see A. Houbraken, op. cit., vol. II, note 8). Precisely how these ‘perspective rooms’ would have been set up is not clear, but Brusati has suggested that Houbraken may have been referring to works such as our picture. She writes: ‘These pictures appear to have been designed to be seen from several specific viewpoints. While all these pictures appear correct if viewed frontally, they present strikingly different illusions when seen from the side.’ Hoogstraten notes that he was invited to dine alongside gentlemen from the Royal Society at the house of Thomas Povey, and further remarks that Pepys and his Royal Society colleagues appreciated Hoogstraten’s experimentations with perspective.

The Master of Perspective:

The surviving large-scale perspectives from Hoogstraten’s English period show marble- columned courtyards, and some of them may have originated with the decorative scheme commissioned from Hoogstraten by the Finch family. The best-known of his large-scale perspective paintings is the Dyrham Park picture, which, like our work, does not include figures, although it is filled with signs of human activity. Most prominent among these are the tools of perspective – the compass and papers – lying on the table in the foreground between two empty chairs. Another large Perspective View of the Courtyard of a House at Dyrham Park is thought to be the ‘Great Perspective’ purchased by William Blathwayt from his uncle, Thomas Povey in the 1690s. Blathwayt’s nephew and clerk, John Povey, recorded that ‘there is a Necessity of placing [the painting] in one side of the Best Stair Case where after all by the Elevation and the proper placing of it promises a Wonderfull Effect’. Perspective views such as ours are extremely rare. Aside from the two paintings at Dyrham Park, it is widely accepted that Hoogstraten probably painted only about four other imposing perspective views during his English period, including this example, which Brusati calls ‘one of the most curious…an enigmatic architectural perspective, known as the Tuscan Gallery’. Like the Dyrham picture, which is framed by two Ionic columns, our work employs a trompe l’oeil device in the form of two stone jambs at each edge of the canvas. These pictorial conceits were clearly intended to provide a portal between the two-dimensional painted perspective of the picture and the three-dimensional interiors for which they were painted.

The previous owner of this painting was a direct descendant of Anne Povey, the sister of Hoogstraten’s English patron Thomas Povey, and her second husband, Thomas Vivian, via their son, also called Thomas, and Lucy Glynn, through the Barons Vivian of Glynn. It may be possible in due course to trace the painting’s provenance directly back to Thomas Povey, although we have thus far been unable to determine a direct path. It may simply be that the painting’s previous owners, whose parents acquired Elgin House and this painting in the early 20th Century, have a coincidental tie to Hoogstraten’s patron; whether or not it was originally a Povey commission remains a matter of speculation. We do know that the painting was in Innes House in the collection of the 2nd Earl of Fife by 1808, at which point it appears on a collection inventory, but it does not appear in a 1798 inventory, so it must have been acquired sometime after that point and remained at Innes House until its sale in 2024.