Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses (Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History)

This indispensable and admirably lucid volume examines some key issues surrounding the display of art (predominantly paintings) in Dutch homes during the seventeenth century. Thanks to the research of Montias and others, we now know a fair amount about the production and marketing (and in a general sense, the ownership) of works of art made for the domestic market in the seventeenth century; we know rather less about what happened to these pieces after they were brought home. How were works of art distributed throughout the home? Were certain subjects deemed more appropriate for specific domestic spaces than others? How were the paintings physically displayed, and how did this affect the perception of those works? To address these questions, the authors gathered evidence from several sources archival inventories of moveable goods, primarily from Amsterdam and Dordrecht; contemporary writings (mostly, but not exclusively, Dutch) on how paintings should be hung or displayed; contemporary images that show works of art displayed in domestic settings; and doll houses. They are careful to note the prejudices and pitfalls inherent in each category of evidence: artworks may have been temporarily relocated to a central area to facilitate the compilation of a household inventory, for example, thus skewing our understanding of the usual decor. Similarly, popular 'high life' genre paintings probably exaggerate the incidence of luxury items in the artist's drive to demonstrate a virtuoso rendering of patterns and surfaces.