The Great or St James' Church in The Hague

Johannes Bosboom's painting of the Great or St. James' Church (Grote of Sint-Jacobskerk) in The Hague is another entry in his comprehensive visual survey of The Hague's sacred spaces. The St. James' Church, a fifteenth-century Gothic church serving the Dutch Reformed community, was one of The Hague's most important ecclesiastical buildings and the burial place of distinguished members of the city's elite. Bosboom's interior church paintings stood in direct lineage from the seventeenth-century Dutch church interior tradition of Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte, and the comparison was frequently made in his own time.

The cool grey light of a Dutch Reformed interior — stripped of Catholic ornamentation, the Gothic architecture standing in its essential structural clarity — is Bosboom's subject as much as the architecture. His palette for church interiors is characteristically luminous grey: pearl, silver, and the warm ochre of old stone.