Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam holds a magnificent collection of seventeenth-century household implements. It is part of the Van Beuningen-de Vriese Collection, which covers a wide range of pre-industrial artefacts and domestic design. These objects were part of Dutch daily life in the seventeenth century. The many and varied artefacts were used in the domestic setting – cooking utensils and kitchenware, objects for wining, dining and tobacco-smoking, hygiene and medical implements, lighting and heating, dress accessories, crafts and tools, birth and marriage gifts, and miniature utensils used as children’s toys.
Seventeenth-century domestic artefacts provide a wealth of information about the material aspects and dynamics of daily life, and also speak to us through art. Alongside a beautiful selection of around a hundred artefacts, this exhibition features twelve seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and twenty engravings from the museum’s collection. Dutch Domestic Life in the Seventeenth Century, a touring exhibition, explores functional aspects of artefacts of the period and reflects on their iconographic meaning in art and the specific role of common objects as motifs for artists.
World-famous Dutch artists, Jan Steen, Jan Miense Molenaer and Quiringh van Brekelenkam among them, used everyday artefacts as theatrical props in their popular genre paintings. Cooking pots and tobacco pipes became an integral part of the rich visual language of Dutch art in the seventeenth century. Tracing a number of themes, the exhibition presents the unique story of artefacts, in material, design, function and symbolic meaning, enhanced and contextualized by a beautiful selection of artworks by famous Dutch painters and engravers of the seventeenth century.
1. Cooking & Housekeeping
The durable kitchenware produced in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century was made of brass, copper or cast iron. In the kitchen, around which the household revolved, the most important articles were copper kettles, brass and cast-iron cooking pots and dripping pans made of sheet iron. Various materials such as wood, pewter and earthenware were used in the production of all the other essential forms of kitchenware. These objects appear in many seventeenth-century paintings of kitchens.
For example, the Delft artist Cornelis Jacobsz Delff painted The Housekeeper, an impressive kitchen still life with a young kitchen maid and her African servant. Another beautiful example is The Pancake Woman (1634), a print by Cornelis Visscher. Dutch pancakes were cooked at home over the fire but often also outdoors, where they were sold as street food. Barent Gael was inspired by this typically Dutch subject which resulted in a beautiful painting with the same title which is also part of this exhibition.
2. The Prayer Before The Meal & Merry Companies
Simple and luxurious versions of eating and drinking utensils in all shapes and sizes, made from a variety of materials, could be found on the tables of seventeenth-century homes and inns. At that time ‘dining culture’ expanded enormously at all levels of society. Food and drink had never been so varied. The hot meal of the day was eaten at midday. Breakfast and supper usually consisted of bread and milk, bread, butter and cheese with light, warm beer, as we see in a painting by Quiringh van Brekelenkam, The Prayer Before The Meal.
In his 1655 book of etiquette, Tafelmanieren en tafelwetten, Jacob Cats advised the reader: ‘take care not to spill wine or beer and do not play with your plate. And do not fiddle with your napkin as that is against the old law.’ This old law will not have been taken too strictly by the people drinking to excess with a variety of drinking utensils and using stimulants like tobacco as depicted in the genre painting Merry Company by Jan Molenaer. The merry companies in this type of genre painting were intended to make viewers laugh but also to hold up a mirror to their foibles.
3. Gifts & Conversation Pieces
Paintings were not the only decorative objects in the seventeenth century home that one could contemplate or talk about in company; decorated utensils also had a role as ‘conversation pieces’. A celebration, engagement, wedding, birth or baptism could prompt the gift of a special object. Its shape, material, decoration and the date added to it made it a reminder of a special moment in life. Even earthenware cooking pots, with the name of the recipient and the date, were symbolic gifts.
For the most part, decorated cooking pots were not used for cooking and were kept to commemorate a special occasion, such as a marriage. At the same time the cooking pot was the ultimate symbol of the seventeenth-century woman, alluding as it did to her duties and place in the household. Meanwhile, the chamber pot and the candlestick served as erotic references to the forthcoming honeymoon night in the print of Crispijn de Passe.
Note: Works on paper can change due to lux restrictions because of previous presentations.
Want to know more?
Sandra Tatsakis Director Touring Exhibitions T + 31 (0)10 44 19 421 tatsakis@boijmans.nl
