The Gelderse Kade and the Waag, Amsterdam

Ten Compe began his career as an apprentice to Dirk Dalens III, before establishing himself as one of the leading Dutch painters of cityscapes of the eighteenth century. He studied the works of his famous predecessors, Jan van der Heyden (see lot 1227) and Gerrit Berckheyde (see lot 1222). His topographical views were much sought after, and Ten Compe received commissions from several distinguished art-lovers and connoisseurs, including the famous collector Gerret Braamcamp, who praised his ability to capture reality and to follow nature with extraordinary accuracy. Although he normally charged between five and eight hundred guilders for his works, Ten Compe is known to have received as much as two thousand guilders for a view of the St. Anthonieswaag on the Nieuwmarkt, commissioned by Heer Van de Velde of Amsterdam.

The St. Antonieswaag, or Nieuwe Waag, on the Nieuwmarkt in Amsterdam, was originally built in 1488 as a city gate, the St. Anthoniespoort, and formed part of the city wall. From 1617 onwards, the lower floor was used as a weigh-house and in the nineteenth century it became an oil warehouse. The upper part of the building was used variously as a theatrum anatomicum (the guild-room of the surgeons in the Waag once housed Rembrandt's famous Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and his Anatomical Lesson of Dr. Joan Deyman, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), a collegium chirurgicum, a dissection room and the city's fencing academy (see A.J. van der Aa, Aardrijkskundig woordenboek der Nederlanden, Gorinchem, 1839, I, p. 182).