What was life at home like in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, when that tiny nation was one of the most powerful on earth? The precisely rendered genre paintings of Vermeer, Gerrit Dou and Pieter de Hooch make us feel we already know. But those serene interiors are carefully orchestrated constructs, theatres for the play of light or perspective and far removed from the messy reality of cleaning, earning a living and child-rearing that seeps into the walls of a real home.
It is with this dissonance in mind that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has mounted an exhibition designed to come as close as possible to the practicalities of everyday life in that infinitely fascinating era, for both young and old, rich and poor. Its core collection is from the 1600s and generously stuffed with fine furniture, silverware, ceramics and paintings from that so-called Golden Age, but ‘At Home in the 17th Century’ rigorously embraces as many ‘things’ as masterpieces. Yes there are handsome tapestries, carved wood cabinets and priceless dolls’ houses, but they jostle for space with cracked cooking pots, lice combs and memorieboeken – notebooks in which women recorded the things they purchased, housekeeping tips and favourite recipes. Even the contents of a cesspit.
This concentration of little-seen, rarely considered objects brings real freshness and immediacy to the survey, not to mention plenty of new insights. The effect is beautifully engrossing, comparable to glancing through the window of a warmly lit home as you pass it on a dark evening and seeing someone laying a table, or scooping up a child.
As installed within the building, the exhibition unfolds across a series of rooms and according to the course of a single day, from first light to nightfall. Charmingly, the brightness of each room has been adjusted to match its hour. It feels so intimate, particularly in the dimmer hours: as if you were drifting through real halls, attics and kitchens.
First up, a huge hearth – that ur-symbol of home, and vital during what was called the Little Ice Age. The object under consideration here is a small, glazed earthenware fire curfew dating from 1637 and decorated with Biblical symbolism, and it takes a few seconds to locate it within the corner of a typical Dutch kitchen in which it is presented, all of which – mantel, plates, smoke hood and tiled floor – is made from cartoonishly painted cardboard.
This bravura architectural set is the work of designer and theatre maker Steef de Jong: one of nine diorama-style displays in the show that render a sense of how the object was used, and so brilliantly that the wall texts sometimes feel superfluous.
There are around 200 objects in all, although each dolls’ house (there are two, including the one that inspired Jessie Burton’s 2014 novel The Miniaturist) contains in the region of 800 individual pieces. It took their devoted owners 25–30 years to assemble the contents, which represent less a picture of the past than an ideal of domestic perfection, one in which the linen cupboard is always tidy and the silverware gleaming.
Being rarely handled, however, they are invaluable for historians because they contain items whose life-size, real-life equivalents rotted away long ago. Wicker baskets, for instance, which were used to carry everything, and silk upholstery.
Inequality of life was huge in the 17th century: while wealthy young wives were spending tens of thousands of guilders on miniature silver salvers and Amsterdam was building itself a new town hall on the scale and magnificence of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, as much as a quarter of the Republic’s population were cooped up in damp, one- or two-room dwellings, barely scraping a living.
This is strikingly conveyed in the exhibition by means of a cupboard placed opposite one of the dolls’ houses and of its exact dimensions, containing the entire worldly goods of a pauper named Thomas Hendricks. Every piece of his cookware, clothing and linen – he had no furniture at all – was listed in an inventory conducted by the Poor Relief Office of the city of Zwolle in 1673, and, like the cupboard itself, is evocatively rendered here in cardboard by De Jong.
Seventeenth-century clothing is incredibly rare, and the few pieces on display in the show stunning: the only surviving example in the Netherlands of a pleated ruff, for instance, made from 17 metres of fabric. Also some gorgeous rose-pink stays, an embroidered silk jacket for a six-month-old, padded against the cold, and an example of the combing cloths that protected silk or wool garments when the hair was deloused or combed, later a popular fashion accessory.
As engaging is a silver bowl used to toast the health of an unborn child with one’s friends, cleverly set by De Jong into a box through which you poke your head and see the faces of other visitors doing the same. The idea of communal well-wishing becomes all the more poignant when we learn that 50 per cent of children didn’t make it to adulthood. Nearby is a family Bible, on whose flyleaf a mother has recorded three sons lost in five years.
Such deeply personal stories bubble up throughout. Take the above-mentioned cesspit. Many urban households had a wooden or a brick one beneath their house that was used to dispose of refuse and as a latrine. Since the remains of every meal ended up here (in one form or another) it offers a remarkably detailed picture of 17th-century eating habits. This cesspit belonged to Burgomaster and ambassador Albert Sonck, his second wife Cornelia, their nine children and a daughter-in-law – a portrait of one of their sons and his family is on the gallery wall, flooding the display with meaning; the story of their lives conjured in jugs for warming milk, an apple-baking pan, egg and nutshells, and the remains of meals including herring, flounder, ray and eel, heron, bittern, water rail and snipe (roasted waterbirds were considered nutritious at the time).
And it’s impossible, once you have seen her portrait and possessions, to forget the bladder stone that was surgically removed from Catharina Fourmenois – wife of a director of the Dutch East India Company – without anaesthetic in 1647. The operation was one of the most frequently performed surgeries in the 17th century, though few survived it. Catharina had already had 13 children by then, so perhaps she was particularly robust.
While much in this show underscores the vast difference between life now and life then, a lot is quite relatable. The effort of keeping the house clean, the joy and frustrations of family, the horror of cold bedsheets on an icy January night. All these bring us so close to the once breathing beings whose possessions are on show here. In opting for something more creative and playful than exact recreation, the Rijksmuseum has summoned the past beautifully to life.
‘At Home in the 17th century’ is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until 11 January 2026.
