Dolls' House of Petronella Oortman
Unknown, cabinet by an Amsterdam furniture maker · About 1686 to 1710
A tall cabinet of tortoiseshell and pewter opens to show nine rooms of a wealthy Amsterdam house in miniature: a lying in room with a curtained bed, a salon with painted walls, a tapestry hung room, a kitchen with copper pans, a linen room, a nursery, and a best kitchen full of Chinese porcelain. Everything is made to scale and by the best craftsmen. The porcelain was ordered from China, the silver from Amsterdam silversmiths, the wicker basket from a basket maker, and the paintings on the walls were done by real painters. It was never a toy.
Petronella Oortman, the wife of a silk merchant, assembled the house between about 1686 and 1710 and spent on it, according to a contemporary, twenty to thirty thousand guilders, the price of a real canal house. Dolls' houses of this kind were a fashion among rich Dutch women, a way of displaying taste and wealth and of practising the management of a household. Look for the tiny linen press, the marble floor of the hall, the ceiling painting in the salon and the miniature cradle. A painting of the house by Jacob Appel, hanging nearby, shows it with the dolls that once lived in it; most of them have since been lost.
The cabinet was bought by the state in 1875 and is one of three such houses in the museum. It is probably the most famous dolls' house in the world, thanks in part to Jessie Burton's novel The Miniaturist, which was inspired by it and imagined a mysterious maker of its tiny furnishings. Children press their noses to the glass, but the house rewards adults just as much, as a record of how the richest Dutch families of the Golden Age wanted to live.
Did You Know? Petronella Oortman spent as much on the miniature house as a full size canal house would have cost, and ordered its porcelain specially from China.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.