HEVELIUS, Hever, Hewel, Hewelke, or Hövelke, Johann (1611–1687), astronomer, was born at Dantzic on January 28, 1611, and died there on January 28, 1687 (see Astronomy, vol. ii p. 754).
HEXHAM, a market-town of England, county of Northumberland, is situated on the south bank of the river Tyne, crossed there by a handsome stone bridge of nine arches, 20 miles west from Newcastle and 36 east from Carlisle, and on the line of railway connecting those towns. It is somewhnt trregularly built, and consists chiefly of several narrow streets diverging from the market-place, a spacious square. Its detects in architecture and arrangement are, however, compensated for by its pleasant situation and the imposing remains of the old priory church. This church, begun by Wilfrid in 674, and completed by Acca, his successor, remained uninjured till 875, when every part of the monastery but the stone work was destroyed by the Danes. It was built of stones used in an earlier work, and many of them bear Roman inscriptions. Originally in dimensions and splendour it was unsurpassed on this side of the Alps, and doubtless had no small influence on ecclesiastical architecture in various parts of England. The building as renovated in the 12th century consisted of nave and transepts, choir and aisles, and a massive central tower ; but the nave was burned by the Scots in 1296, and has never been rebuilt. The style is Early English with Transition details. The crypt, discovered in 1726, is a fine example of Saxon architecture, of which there appear also to be some traces in the choir. Among the interest- ing old monuments which have been collected in the transept is a sculptured stone slab of Oswulf, king of Northumbria, of the date 788. To the west of the church there are still some remains of the conventual buildings. Near the market-place there are two old castellated towers. A vessel containing about 8000 Saxon coins was discovered in the churchyard in 1832. The ‘Seal,” formerly the park of the monks, is now used as a promenade, and from an eminence within its bounds a fine view is obtained. Hex- ham possesses a new town-hall and corn exchange, erected in 1866 in the Italian style, and a large board school. A hydropathic establishment has recently been opened. Leather gloves are the principal manufacture of the town ; and it has tanneries, wool-staplers’ yards, a brewery, and an iron and brass foundry. In the neighbourhood there are extensive market gardens and nurseries. The popula- tion of the township in 1871 was 5331, and of the parish 6437.
Hexham is supposed by some to have been the Axelodunum of the Romans, but although in all probability it was a Roman station, the similarity in the names is too slight to establish the identity. By the Saxons it was called Hextoldesham and Halgulstad from two ot the neighbouring streams, Wilfrid, who founded the monastery and church in 673, received from Queen Etheldreda a grant of the town and a large surrounding tract of country. In 681 the southern portion of Bernicia was formed into the diocese of Hexham, which comprised the county of Durham and the greater part of Northumberland. In 821 Hexham was united to the diocese of Lindisfarne, after which it formed part of Durham, then of York until 1837, when it was restored to Durham. In 875 the town was plundered by the Danes and the monastery destroyed. In 1138 the monastery was plundered by the Scots, and in 1296 they again attacked the town and destroyed the nave of the conventual church. In the reign of Henry VIII. the last prior of Hexham was in 1536 hanged at the gate of the monastery for being concerned in the insurrection called the Pilgrimage of Grace.
See the old History of the Church of Hceham by Prior Richard ; Roman Hexham and Hexham Church in Archeologia Asliana, new series, vol. v.; Wright’s History of Hexham, 1823; The Priory of Hexham, its Chroniclers, Endowments, and Annals, edited for the Surtees Society by James Raine, 1864-65 ; Hewitt, 4 Handbook to Hecham and its Antiquitics, Hexham, 1879.
HEYDEN, Jan van der, was born at Goreum in 1637, and died at Amsterdam on the 12th of September 1712. He was an architectural landscape painter, a contemporary of Hobbema and Jacob Ruysdael, with the advantage, which they lacked, of a certain professional versatility; for, whilst they painted admirable -pictures and starved, he varied the practice of art with the study of mechanics, improved the fire engine, and died superintendent of the lighting and director of the firemen’s company at Amsterdam, Till 1672 he painted in partnership with Adrian van der Velde. After Adrian’s death, and probably because of the loss which that event entailed upon him, he accepted the offices to which allusion has just been made. At no period of artistic activity had the system of division of labour been more fully or more constantly applied to art than it was in Holland towards the close of the 17th cen- tury. Vander Heyden, who was perfect as an architectural draughtsman in so far as he painted the outside of build- ings and thoroughly mastered linear perspective, seldom turned his hand to the delineation of anything but brick houses and churches in streets and squares, or rows along canals, or “ moated granges,” common in his native country, He was a travelled man, bad seen the Hague, Ghent, and Brussels, and had ascended the Khine past Xanten to Cologne, where he copied over and over again the tower and crane of the great cathedral. But he cared nothing for hill or vale, or stream or wood. He could reproduce the rows of bricks in a square of Dutch houses sparkling in the sun, or stunted trees and lines of dwellings varied by stceples, all in light or thrown into passing shadow by moving cloud. He had the art of painting microscopically without loss of breadth or keeping. But he could draw neither man nor beast, nor ships nor carts; and this was his disadvantage. His good genius under these circumstances was Adrian van der Velde, who enlivened his compositions with spirited figures ; and the joint labour of both is a delicate, minute, transparent work, radiant with glow and atmosphere, and most pleasant to look at. Almost all Van der Heyden’s pieces are inscribed with his name alone, as if Van der Velde had been but a sleeping partner in his work. Like Heusch, he formed the first letters of Lis name into a monogrammatic interlacement. Very few of his pictures are dated. Oue, a street ina Dutch town, of 1666, is in the Hope collection in London. Two of 1667, a bridge on a canal, lined with houses casting their reflexions into the water, and the town-house at Amsterdam, are in the galleries of the Hague and Florence. Another view of the dam and town-hall at Amsterdam, dated 1668, is in the Louvre. A church and houses in the museum of Dresden is inscribed 1673, In all there are seventy or more of Van der Heyden’s works fairly accessible to the public—those which are least so being chiefly in English private collections. Fight capital examples are in the Hermitage at St Petersburg, two of which are views in Cologne. Four are in the London National Gallery, four at Amsterdam and Dresden. Munich and Cassel have two apiece, and two very fine ones are in Buckingham Palace. The rest are in public and private galleries in Vienna, Paris, Frankfort, and Carlsruhe.
HEYDUKE. See Hajduk.
