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The museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder occupies a well-preserved seventeenth-century canal house on Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam. In 1661, the property was purchased by the wealthy Catholic merchant Jan Hartman (1619–1668). As Catholics were not allowed to practice their religion openly at the time, he had a clandestine church constructed in the attic, dedicated to St. Nicholas. This church – the nucleus of the museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder – illustrates the way people dealt with different religions in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, clandestine churches became obsolete. As a result, this building opened as a museum in 1888, thereby becoming the second oldest museum in Amsterdam, after the Rijksmuseum.
The most important piece in the collection is the Baroque altar of the attic church. The altarpiece, framed by two marble columns with putti and eighteenth-century wooden candle-holders, was painted in 1716 by the Amsterdam artist Jacob de Wit (1695–1754) and depicts The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan. Another interesting ensemble of paintings in the museum consists of the Passion series by Adriaen van de Velde (1636–1672), which was commissioned for the church by the pious, wealthy Amsterdam woman Sybilla Fonteijn in 1664.
The museum’s collection includes manuscripts, books, prints, paintings, liturgical objects and vestments, devotional items, priest medals, and sculptures. Many of these objects come from the inventories of house churches dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One particularly noteworthy piece is a portrait of Petrus Parmentier, the first priest of the attic church, produced in 1681.
Related CODART publications
Judikje Kiers and Thijs Boers Interviewed Gerdien Verschoor and Michiel Franken, “The Building as a Museum Object: Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder”, CODARTfeatures, September 2016.