Dirck van Delen was among the most formidable architectural painters of the 17th-century Netherlands, so it is unsurprising that over the course of his career he chose to depict the Pool at Bethesda no less than three times. The Pool, described in John 5:2-4 as "having five porches," presents an inherent imaginative challenge, especially for an artist interested in architecture.

According to the Gospel, the location was one of healing, where the Archangel Raphael came to cure the blind and crippled. Timothy Trent Blade,in his 1976 catalogue raisonné of Van Delen's paintings has suggested that the artist's pictures of the Pool at Bethesda, due both to their subject and intimate scale, may have been co...