Most of the churches on this page still stand, and the men who painted them knew them well, sometimes well enough to measure every pier. Yet they changed what they saw. A column grew wider, the sun came in from the wrong side. None of these changes was an accident, and each one says what the painter wanted the building to mean.
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How These Were Chosen
A church painting is not a painting made for a church. An altarpiece hangs there so that people can pray before it. Here the building itself is the subject: a nave seen from an aisle, a tower at sunset, a facade in full sun.
It is a hard subject. A nave runs deep enough to expose any slip in perspective, its light moves across bare stone hour by hour, and everyone in town knows the building, so a misplaced pier does not go unnoticed.
Every picture below makes a church its subject, never a backdrop behind a saint, and most show a building that still stands. The list runs from the least known to the most famous, and each entry follows what the painter did with the building in front of him.
12. Robert Delaunay, Saint-Séverin No. 3 (1909 to 1910)
Not one stone pier stands straight in this view of Saint-Séverin, a Gothic church in Paris. The piers lean and swell toward the middle of the walkway that curves behind the choir, and the stained-glass windows that light them come in only three colors: beige, dark blue and green. Robert Delaunay made the canvas in 1909 and 1910, in his mid-twenties, at a church a short walk from his studio in the Latin Quarter.
The walkway he chose, called the ambulatory, was already unusual in stone. Masons built it between 1489 and 1495 in the late Gothic style known as Flamboyant, and they doubled it into two rings of piers around a single pillar carved as a spiral. The ribs of the vault spring from each pier like fronds from a trunk, which is why the parish still calls it the palm grove.
Delaunay pushed those curves further than stone allows, and he used light to do it. With the palette held to three colors, every change of tone on a pier reads as a change in the light falling on it, so the windows seem to be what bends the stone. Of all his Saint-Séverin canvases, he considered this third version the most representative.
At a Glance
Artist: Robert Delaunay (1885 to 1941)
Painted: 1909 to 1910
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 113.8 × 89.5 cm (44.8 × 35.3 in)
Where to see it: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
About This Painting
How many Saint-Séverin paintings did Robert Delaunay make?
Seven, made between the spring of 1909 and early 1910. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns another version.
Is Delaunay's Saint-Séverin a Cubist painting?
Partly. The series keeps a traditional perspective but breaks the surfaces into fragments and distorts the forms, in a way inspired by Cubism.
11. Gerard Houckgeest, Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft, with the Tomb of William the Silent (1650)
Deep inside the choir of the New Church in Delft, a golden bronze woman raises one arm at the corner of a black and white marble tomb. Two massive white columns lead the eye toward her, and at the railing below a mother waits with her small child.
The tomb is that of William the Silent, the prince of Orange who led the Dutch revolt against Spain, and it was hard to paint. Gerard Houckgeest's own teacher had given up and invented a church around it. In 1650 Houckgeest went into the real choir, looking for the one place from which it could be seen.