An 17th-century dollhouse, one of the most elaborate of its kind, has become a star attraction at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, home of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Vermeer’s Milkmaid and even a painting of the dollhouse itself, painted in 1710.
Made in 1686 for Petronella Oortman, wife of a wealthy silk merchant, its nine rooms are filled with miniatures of nearly everything that would have been in a home of Oortman’s class, right down to miniature paintings made by well-known artists of the day. Oortman’s initials are woven into the tiny folded linens in the attic; there are 84 tiny leather-bound books in the library.
Dollhouses were popular among upper-class women of her time, but Oortman’s is so over-the-top it almost beggars the imagination. She and her husband spent money on it so lavishly that the total cost would have purchased an actual canal-side house along the Herrengracht canal where they lived.
Made by a French cabinetmaker working in Amsterdam, it was apparently an attraction even in its own time, and is described in various contemporary accounts.
The Rijksmuseum’s Curator of Furniture, Alexander Dencher, says that “Nowadays people tend to think of dolls houses as playthings, but Petronella Oortman’s doll’s house was a serious work of art and could be called the female equivalent of a collector’s cabinet, which is more often associated with men. It really is an idealised representation of a domestic household of the Dutch elite in the late 17th century.”
