Art-Van Vliet-Interior of the Oude Kerk TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Travel bug photos are appreciated.  I will re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

This is one of a series of travel bugs made to recognize paintings seen, and admired, by the bug owner. A digital copy of this painting was downloaded from the internet. The copy was reduced in size and proportions cropped to accommodate the laminating materials available to the owner. Regrettably these processes diminish the effort of the artist. One truly must see the original in person to fully appreciate the work. The text below is a mixture of my own observations and material gleaned from the internet (mostly Wikipedia and Web Gallery).

Hendric Corneliz. van Vliet (1611-1675), was a painter during the Dutch Golden Age, the 17th century. Prior to this time most patrons of the arts were the church and royalty who largely wanted portraits and paintings with religious or allegorical themes. After the Renaissance, northern Europe became a center of commerce and the middle classes prospered to the point that they wanted art to decorate their homes. And, they had broader tastes in subject matter than institutional patrons. To satisfy the demand, the Dutch and Flemish regions developed an amazing number of artists. Portraiture and religious topics were still important, but landscape, seascape, cityscape, still life and commemorative paintings began to appear.
  
Early on van Vliet practiced portraiture.  Around 1651 he turned to painting interior views of actual churches, mostly the Oude Kerk (Old Church) or the Nieuwe Kerk in (New Church) Delft.  He produced about 20 paintings representing churches in Leiden, Haarlem and Dutch towns other than Delft. As was the case with most of the revered Dutch Masters, Van Vliet died in poverty.
 
The painting presents a view of the Oude Kerk from the south aisle looking northeast. This kind of diagonal arrangement was first employed by Gerard Houckgeest in 1650-51. Van Vliet adopted this scheme, but not Houckgeest's careful fidelity to specific views.  The wife and I visited both the new and old churches in Delft in 2010.  We saw this painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2009.