The return of the saint

In the 19th century we see Saint Nicholas and heart prints in a bakery window in a painting by Jan Hendrik Van Grootvelt (1808–1855), Admiring Candy for the Feast of Saint Nicholas (1841). Here the saint is back out in the open in his bishop’s robes. Children and adults surround the window, in the darkness of a winter evening, with the light shining from the bay window full with sweets as if it was heaven opening its gates. From that same era is a painting of a 17th-century Saint Nicholas market by Petrus Van Schendel (1806–1870). Under the cloak of darkness, the painting entitled The Gingerbread Seller shows us glistening gilded honey cakes being weighed by candlelight, and at the far edge we can just make out the stadhouder as the largest figurine.