The painted wood display case in the dining room of the 17th-century mansion contains 114 blue-and-white porcelain dishes, as well as jugs, vases and drinking vessels made of handblown glass.
No one will ever eat off or drink anything from them. The largest item of the tableware is no more than a half inch, and the tiniest — a teacup — no bigger than a pushpin. They sit inside the dollhouse of Petronella Oortman, one of the collection highlights at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
It’s not for kids.
Although children do enjoy gazing into its dazzling rooms and observing the elements that Oortman collected and displayed with such care, those pieces, made by specialized craftspeople over 300 years ago, are too precious and fragile for avid little fingers.
The fully furnished dollhouse cost about 30,000 guilders in its day — the same price, at the time, as a real mansion on the Herengracht canal, Amsterdam’s most expensive canal.
“It was famous in its time as the most lavish and luxurious doll’s house in Europe,” said Alexander Dencher, a furniture curator at the Rijksmuseum.
For two and a half decades, from 1686 to 1710, Oortman, the wife of a wealthy Amsterdam silk merchant, filled the dollhouse with the most exquisite miniature furnishings, like a four-poster bed draped with silk curtains, sofas topped with velvet cushions, embroidered wall hangings and marble floors. She added everything needed for the running of the house, including 23 tiny wicker baskets to stack the laundry or carry groceries.
Ordinarily on view in the museum’s permanent display, the dollhouse was moved a few weeks ago to another wing, where it is now a centerpiece of the exhibition “At Home in the 17th Century,” which runs through Jan. 11.
The show aims to give visitors a feel for domestic life during the Dutch Golden Age. Although art aficionados have long felt they could glimpse inside the quiet chambers of Dutch houses through the paintings of Jan Steen or Johannes Vermeer, their pictures were “an idealized version,” said Sara van Dijk, the exhibition’s lead curator.
“We want to know what life in the 17th century really was like,” van Dijk said. “In the doll’s house, we have a major source, with all the objects coming together, including all the kinds of things that didn’t survive in a life-size house.”
The house has been a key attraction at the Rijksmuseum since the museum acquired it in the 19th century, van Dijk said. “Our No. 1 highlight is ‘The Night Watch,’” she added, “and Petronella Oortman’s dollhouse is the second. Maybe Vermeer’s ‘Milkmaid’ is somewhere in between — but all I can say is, it’s a very popular object.”
Visitors to the Rijksmuseum from around the world gaze into the dollhouse and feel inspired to fill its rooms with made-up stories. The British writer Jessie Burton saw it on a trip to Amsterdam in 2009 and imagined Oortman as a young bride who receives the dollhouse as a wedding present from an anonymous craftsman who then sends her tiny objects that seem to predict the future.
This became the basis for Burton’s 2014 novel, “The Miniaturist,” which was an international best seller and has since been translated into dozens of languages and adapted into a TV series starring Anya Taylor-Joy.
Because little information survives about Oortman’s biography, Burton filled in gaps herself.
“I’m glad I didn’t know,” she said in an interview. “I was fascinated by the society she lived in, and the fact that she could spend that kind of money on food she couldn’t eat, property she couldn’t live in and beds she couldn’t sleep in.”
While many Dutch women of the burgher class kept dollhouses, only three examples from the era are known to still exist, and all of them, by coincidence, were owned by women named Petronella.
Two from the Rijksmuseum — Oortman’s and another house owned by Petronella Dunois, from about 1676 — are on show in “At Home in the 17th Century.” The third, owned by Petronella de la Court from 1670 to 1690, is in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.
Oortman was 30 when she commissioned a cabinet maker to create her dollhouse, which is about six and a half feet high and made of oak with a tortoiseshell veneer. It took him three years to build, and during that time he was a tenant in Oortman’s home on the Warmoesstraat, in the city’s oldest quarter, van Dijk said.
Her husband, Johannes Brandt, used the front part of the house as a storefront for his silk business. The 17th century was an era of expanding global trade, and wealthy male collectors in the Netherlands often built “wonderkamers,” or cabinets of curiosities, to showcase shells, taxidermy animals and other rare objects brought back to Europe through international commerce.
In a similar way, women collected items to fill their dollhouses that represented the entire world — but in miniature. Oortman bought tiny items from local silversmiths, as well as shells from India and Africa, and porcelain from China and Japan.
“The household was considered the tiniest building block of society, and the mother has the huge task of raising the children and running it,” said van Dijk. “The doll’s house represents the feminine domain.”
When guests visited Oortman’s Warmoesstraat home, she would show them each room of her showcase, pulling back curtains to reveal individual chambers, then opening drawers and cabinet doors to expose the silks and porcelain items inside.
There were once 27 dolls that inhabited the rooms of her dollhouse, each representing a part of a typical household, including servants. Because they were small and fragile, with wax faces, only one doll survives today: A baby in a white swaddling blanket sits unattended on a red armchair in the living room.
When the dolls were in the display, they were tiny actors in household dramas. A 1710 painting of the dollhouse shows two male dolls playing a board game; in another room, a few children stand around another child’s coffin.
“The dollhouse tells the story of life and death,” van Dijk said. “It’s the entire story of the house, the people who lived there, the new generation that’s born, but also about family members passing away.”
For Dencher, the furniture curator, the house is a precious and unique source of detailed information for how an elite home of the era was run.
“You can tell that the women who assembled these cabinets of curiosities really paid as much attention to the laundry room, the kitchen, the attic — to make sure that they were completely stocked and equipped with everything necessary for running a home,” he said. “So everything from dusters to brooms to buckets is present, and as much attention and care is lavished on these rooms as the more luxurious spaces.”
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