Object: Picture - Drawing, View of New Utrecht (today’s Bensonhurst, Brooklyn) in 1806

This rare early 19th-century drawing of View of New Utrecht—today’s Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn—was drawn on the spot by the artist Cornelis Apostool (1762–1844). Apostool spent a brief period working in the New York area before returning to the Netherlands, where he became the first director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

As in his contemporaneous depiction of New Amersfoort, Apostool in his view of New Utrecht focuses on the area’s old Dutch buildings and evocative rural setting. He offers a detailed rendering of the town’s first Dutch Reformed Church: an octagonal stone structure with a peaked roof, topped by a belfry bearing an iron cross and a large rooster-shaped weathervane. The church’s striking tower—then the tallest structure in the neighborhood—served as a vital navigational landmark for sea captains.

Situated in the southwestern part of Brooklyn, New Utrecht was among the first six towns established in Kings County. The land on which the town was later built was acquired in 1651 from the Canarsie and Nyack Indians by the Utrecht-born Cornelius van Werckhoven [Werkhoven], a Dutch West India Company investor, who however soon returned to Holland.

By 1660 the town consisted of eleven houses, and in 1661 Governor Peter Stuyvesant granted it an official charter. After the completion of the town’s own church building in 1677, the early residents—families with Dutch names such as Beeckman, Bennett, Corlear, Cortelyou, Cowenhoven, De Sille (Nicasius de Sille), Jacobsen, Terhune, Van Dyke, and Van Brunt—were finally able to worship locally rather than traveling to the Dutch churches in Flatbush or Flatlands. Many of these early settlers are buried in the cemetery of the New Utrecht Reformed Dutch Church, a lasting reminder of the area’s deep Dutch roots.

Reference: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Object: Drawing

Title: ‘New Utrecht, Long Island, North America / drawn on the spot, by C. Apostool Aº 1806’

Artist: Cornelis Apostool, Dutch (1762–1844)

Date: 1806

Inv. nr: RP-T-2000-83

Medium: pen and ink, gray washes

Dimensions: 15 cm x 21 cm