Dutch interiors of the Golden Age deconstructed

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The history of interior decoration as it pertains to Continental, English, and American domestic spaces has been the subject of scholarly inquiry for many years. More recently scholars have mined period documents, paintings, prints, and drawings for information about the arrangement of rooms from the Middle Ages onward. Most of these findings have been published, but with the advice that the sources should be used with caution since they can embroider considerably on the truth.

An intriguing exhibition currently on view and its excellent catalogue contribute much new information about one aspect of the subject. Entitled Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, the exhibition is on view at the Newark Museum in New Jersey until January 20, 2002. It then travels to the Denver Art Museum, where it may be seen from March 2 to May 22, 2002. Major funding for the Newark showing was provided by Pfizer. The guest curator of the exhibition is Mariet Westermann, who is the principal author of the catalogue, which also contains contributions by W. Willemijn Fock, Eric Jan Sluijter, and H. Perry Chapman. The 142 objects on view include paintings, works on paper, ceramics, metalwork, glass, furniture, and textiles made in the seventeenth century.

Historians of economics have estimated that some five million paintings were executed in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and that interior views and still lifes comprised at least ten percent of this output, or about five hundred thousand works. The meticulous rendering of the accouterments of the interiors shown in portraits, genre paintings, and paintings of interiors is what we find so appealing. In reality, however, these renderings reflect a healthy dose of artistic license on the part of the painters.

Because these works are so expertly painted, we tend to believe that the artist was looking at the exact scene he recorded. Even the architectural settings in the paintings are not always faithful to what scholars now know existed in the first half of the seventeenth century. For example, the depiction of rooms beyond rooms enabled artists to show their considerable skill in painting deep perspective. However, Dutch houses were not designed with rooms enfilade until the eighteenth century. Fock posits that this significant change in house design might even be partially credited to painters.

Painting chandeliers permitted artists to demonstrate their expertise at rendering shimmering and refractive brass under changing light conditions. However, multibranch chandeliers were rarely found even in the houses of the wealthiest burghers (which had one at most), and in the very few inventories where chandeliers are listed they are called kerkkroon (church chandeliers), because examples of this type were more often hung in churches or civic buildings than in houses. Marble floors were principally found in the voorhuis (entrance ball) and corridors of the house with the remainder of the flooring being polished wood. Turkish carpets, which appear in Dutch paintings with some frequency, are only rarely listed in inventories. It was the colorful patterns of these textiles and their plush texture that tested the artists' abilities. In reality, rush matting was most frequently used on floors. In short, the paintings, as contrasted to the documents of the period, clearly show that the artists' renderings of in teriors rested somewhere between artifice and reality.

By contrast, individual objects in paintings appear to be faithful renderings. Thus furniture and other objects on view in the exhibition are displayed according to the way they appear in paintings.

The catalogue of the exhibition is copublished by the Denver Art Museum, the Newark Museum, and Waanders Publishers.