Dutch family of artists. Jan Saenredam is best known as a gifted engraver and draughtsman in the circle of Hendrick Goltzius. Besides his artistic activities, a document shows that he invested wisely in the Dutch East India Company and made sufficient profits to ensure that his only son, Pieter Saenredam, need not ever depend on painting for his living. Pieter was nevertheless enormously successful as a painter, he is generally appreciated as the artist whose depictions of actual church interiors established a new genre in Dutch painting. While important precedents occur in the work of other artists (mainly Flemings, such as Hendrik van Steenwyck I), no painter or draughtsman before Saenredam had the interest, tenacity or the art market to support a career largely devoted to this speciality.