An eighteenth-century Dutch dolls' house

Magazine Antiques, July, 1994 by Valerie Jackson Douet

In the seventeenth century the fashion for creating dolls' houses moved from Germany to the Netherlands, where it became the hobby of wealthy ladies. Never intended for children, these Dutch dolls' houses comprised large wooden cabinets containing rooms richly furnished with costly miniatures and sometimes dolls that demonstrate in precise detail how rich families decorated their houses.[1]

Sara Ploos van Amstel of Amsterdam was one of the wealthy ladies who made a hobby of dolls' houses. Born Sara Rothe, in 1721 she married the prosperous merchant Jacob Ploos van Amstel (1695-1760), whose annual income was at one time eight thousand guilders during a period when a man of the middle class could expect to earn about six hundred guilders a year. Sara created two splendid dolls' houses -- the one shown here and another now in the Frans Halsmuseum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.[2] Also surviving are Sara's detailed notebooks in which she listed what she bought for the dolls' houses, how much each object cost, the names of the craftsmen she employed, and how much they were paid.[3]

On April 10, 1743, Sara acquired three dolls' houses at auction in Amsterdam for 903 guilders. in her notebooks she remarks that they were furnished, and she specifies some of their contents. Two of the dolls' houses dated from the seventeenth century and had previously been up for sale, in 1700. These two had been owned by the artist David van der Plaes (or Plas, Plaas, Plaats; 1647-1704), whose miniature portrait hangs in the lying-in room (see Pl. IV), and who executed one of the landscapes hanging in the collector's room (see Pl. II). On October 28, 1743, Sara commissioned her carpenter Jan Meijjer to build a walnut cabinet (Pl. I and the contents page) to contain her new acquisitions at a cost of 230 guilders. When furnishing her dolls' house she added new rooms and modem objects to those she had bought. However, a number of surviving objects do not appear in her notebooks and were probably purchased after her death by her niece Willemina Erbervelt, who inherited the dolls' house. The objects not in Sara's inventory are several dolls, the chairs and tall-post bed in the nursery, the fire screens in the lying-in and music rooms, and the blue table and blue Delft plates on the left-hand wall in the kitchen.

The rooms are arranged as follows, from left to right: On the ground floor, the lying-in room, garden, and kitchen; on the second floor, the music room, hall, and porcelain room; and on the third floor, the collector's room, laundry room, and nursery.

Lying-in rooms, which appear in all Dutch doll's houses, were presumably a feature of upper-class houses in an age when married women spent much of their time bearing children, not all of whom lived to maturity. These rooms were designed to impress callers wanting to see the new baby, who was displayed by the nurse. This room (Pls. III, IV) was from one of the dolls' houses acquired at auction in 1743. It is richly decorated with a painted ceiling, marbled fireplace and pilasters, watered-silk walls, and a looking glass. The marbling was probably done by Jurriaan Buttner, a portraitist who did the marbleizing in the rest of this and Sara's other dolls' house.[4]

The walls were originally hung with gilded paper in imitation of tooled leather, which Sara eventually replaced with "rose-red moire and for the doing of this have paid Hendrick Meijjer f. [florins] 1.4 such being his reckoning."[5] The bed hangings are of the same material, and the coverlet was embroidered by Sara with the help of her sewing woman Johanna. (Sara's notebooks emphasize the pleasure she took in embroidery.) Sara and her cousin Nigt Hoogehuijse made the blue dress and cape for the doll representing the mother Sara employed J. Castang, an artist, to dress the grand visitor by the fireplace, who wears a silk gown with lace sleeves. On the dressing table at the right is a seventeenth-century silver toilet set from one of the older dolls' houses. A similar, but full-sized, silver-gilt toilet set hallmarked in The Hague between 1653 and 1658 is also in the Gemeentemuseum. The linen cupboard against the right-hand wall of the lying-in room is similar in appearance to the cabinet that contains the rooms of the dolls' house.

The garden has a porch (see Pl. I) that may be removed to reveal the courtyard and perspective views of formal gardens (Pl. VII). Sara had the room made by Jan Meijjer and painted by Buttner. In her notebooks she wrote:

For the painting of the porch which is in the front of this cupboard this being the cupboard which had been made to fit in between the other apartments) and for the garden, views and perspective and the sky, being altogether seven pieces for the which to be paid f.18 and also the same for the painting of the ground in this garden, and for that laid with pebbles, has been paid f.6.[6]

The kitchen (see Pls. I, V) is staffed by three women in chintz dresses with aprons. In it is a mixture of objects from earlier times, those added by Sara, and some after her time. For example, the rather out-of-scale pewter wares in the cupboard against the back wall were common in the seventeenth century, while in the eighteenth they were often augmented by Delft wares such as those displayed in racks on the left-hand wall. Some of the wooden boxes on the floor are foot warmers with pierced lids. Earthenware containers filled with glowing charcoal were placed into actual foot warmers, which servants often carried from house to house when their mistresses went visiting. The room's open fireplace is decorated with a frill, characteristic of the Netherlands.