Jakob Ignaz Hittorff
Interior View of the Church of St Vincent de Paul in Paris, 1833

Jakob Ignaz Hittorff, who was born in Cologne, was, alongside Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), the architect and city planner who had the most lasting effect on the cityscape of Paris as a world metropolis. It is to him that we owe the concept of the famous street axis from the Place de la Concorde via the Champs-Élysées to the Place de l’Étoile (now the Place Charles-de-Gaulle). Among his most important individual buildings are the Gare du Nord and the church of St Vincent de Paul. In them, Hittorff sought to create an architectural gesamtkunstwerk on the model of Roman or early-Christian basilicas.

When the church was consecrated in 1844, it was celebrated as the most modern building in Paris. But it was not until the summer of 1848 that Hittorff obtained permission to set about the interior decoration of the church. The painters François-Édouard Picot and Hippolyte Flandrin were commissioned to carry out the painterly ornamentation, which harked back to Hittorff’s intensive confrontation with the polychromy of classical architecture.

Hittorff’s design for the church interior shows the view of the high altar from the apse chapel through the choir ambulatory; behind we see the nave stretching out to the interior wall of the West façade. The figures, some of them added subsequently, add depth and life to the scene. One can see the richness and the austerely ordered variety of the programme of images and ornamentation. Perspective, treatment of incident light, and coloration create a grandiose total impression, which can still be compared with the real thing even today.

Jakob Ignaz Hittorff
Cologne 1792–1867 Paris

Interior View of the Church of St Vincent de Paul in Paris
1833, Pen and ink over pencil, watercolour on vergé paper, 60.3 x 83.8 cm 
Acquired in 1896 from the estate of Jakob Ignaz Hittdorff
WRM Z 2400