Women in Dutch genre painting

The Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century was a male-dominated society and women were discriminated against in almost every aspect of life. Nevertheless, it is also the case that women had greater rights than in most other countries. For example, women had certain rights to inherit and bequeath property, and they could act as governesses of charitable institutions. Women could work as midwives, market traders and school teachers. Anna Maria van Schurman was an important writer, author of philosophy books and a work on women’s education called The Learned Maid (Schama 404-412). There are also examples of women working as independent artists, including Judith Leyster, Rachel Ruysch and Maria van Oosterwyck. Women tended to control domestic life and must often have chosen the furnishings of the home, including the paintings (Honig 194). Maria de Knuijt, wife of Vermeer’s patron Pieter van Ruijven, left the artist 500 florins in her will, and it is likely that her tastes influenced Vermeer’s art (Vergara 71).

Paintings of everyday life (now called “genre” scenes) provide evidence about women’s status in Dutch society. Several artists, notably Vermeer and De Hooch, specialised in scenes of women in domestic interiors. But it is also true that Dutch genre paintings often depict subjects in which women hardly figure at all. These include scenes of peasants drinking in taverns, dentists extracting teeth, soldiers in their barracks, gamblers cheating at cards, tobacco smokers, astronomers and alchemists, misers counting their gold, travellers attacked by bandits . . . and many more.

   

Judith Leyster,The Proposition, Mauritshuis, The Hague 

  It is useful to consider an individual painting, The Proposition  by Judith Leyster (1609-60), an important painter of genre scenes and a pupil of Frans Hals. Leyster’s painting depicts a rather sinister-looking man offering gold coins to a young woman, who pointedly ignores his unwelcome advances and continues with her sewing. Unlike male artists, who sentimentalise the subject, Leyster gives a realistic presentation of the hard work involved in sewing, carried out in the dim light of the flame from an oil-lamp. As Griselda Pollock points out, Leyster’s notable innovation has been to take two separate subjects of genre painting – a debauchee offering coins to a woman, and a virtuous housewife busy with her sewing – and bring them together into one painting (Pollock 37). Leyster shows things from a female point of view and undermines the way that commercial sex was traditionally depicted in genre painting, which treated the subject from a male perspective as all a bit of a laugh.

It is often claimed that paintings of commercial sex (there was even a special category of picture called a “brothel scene”) were intended as moral warnings against the dangers of such behaviour. But a more probable interpretation is that these paintings were primarily intended to be risqué and amusing. As Oscar Mandel argues, it is likely that the moralising element in Dutch painting has been exaggerated and the humorous element neglected. John Evelyn wrote in 1641 that the Dutch were especially fond of “landscips and drolleries”, which suggests that the primary intention of many genre paintings was to be amusing (Brown 63). Some of these comic paintings were of misogynistic subjects making fun of women. For example, the numerous paintings of quack doctors visiting young women suffering from “love-sickness”.

     

Nicolaes Maes, The Idle Servant, National Gallery, London 

Another popular subject of comedy was the laziness and dishonesty of servants. The servants were nearly always female, because there was a special tax on male servants. A painting by Nicolaes Maes (1634-93) known as The Idle Servant depicts a maid who has fallen asleep in the middle of her duties with a pile of dirty dishes on the floor. As a nice touch, the cat is seizing the chance to steal a chicken. The mistress of the house gestures towards the sleeping servant and smiles at us, suggesting that the comic aspect is more important than the moralising one. Like many Dutch genre paintings, Maes’s The Idle Servant and Leyster’s The Proposition are both paintings which present a problem situation, a conflict between two people. The young woman in Leyster’s painting fulfils her duty to ignore the man and continue with her needlework, and the lady in Maes’s painting fulfils her duty to supervise the cooking and check that the servant is working. 

The Idle Servant shows a scene from life at home, a typical subject for a genre painting. Middle class patrons wanted scenes depicting their own world of home and family. Most housewives stayed at home all day and only went out to do shopping or go to church. Jacob Cats, the popular Dutch moralist, wrote that “the wife must stay at home” (Schama 400). Thus numerous paintings depict women engaged in domestic tasks like sewing, supervising the maidservants and shopping in the fish market. A mother’s most important task was to bring up children to be good adults, and there are many paintings of mothers teaching children to read, combing lice out of their hair, taking care of sick children, and similar subjects. As Wayne Franits has shown, Dutch paintings are the first to extensively explore the theme of mothers and their children, which had previously been restricted to the Madonna and Child (Franits Paragons chapter 3). Art was thought to have a moral function, by showing examples of such good maternal behaviour.                           

    

Jan Steen, The Effects of Intemperance, National Gallery, London 

It was a wife’s duty to manage the home and give good instruction to her children. The bad consequences which occur when she neglects these duties are shown in a painting by Jan Steen (1625/6-79) called The Effects of Intemperance. The mother is sleeping, overcome with alcohol and tobacco, while her naughty children run riot around her. This may refer to the proverb “wine is a mocker”. One of the children is stealing her purse, two others are giving the family’s dinner to a cat, while another is throwing roses to a pig, probably referring to the proverb about “casting pearls before swine”. The maidservant is offering a glass of wine to a parrot, perhaps because a parrot can imitate the bad behaviour of its owners. In the garden we can see the woman’s husband frolicking with another woman. The likely results of all this are symbolised by the objects hanging in a basket above the mother’s head: “the crutch and clapper of the beggar and the birch of judicial punishment” (Brown 88)

Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft, National Gallery, London 

To show the other side of the coin – a virtuous housewife and her orderly home – we can look at The Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch (1629-84). De Hooch’s painting is more naturalistic than Steen’s, and the formal beauty of the courtyard suggests an orderly and well-run home. De Hooch makes less use of obvious symbolism than Steen, although there may be a moral message hidden in the inscription above the doorway: “This is St. Jerome’s vale, if you wish to repair to patience and meekness, for we must first descend if we wish to be raised”  (Franits 165).  The mistress of the house (standing in the corridor) keeps an eye on everything, while the maidservant takes good care of the little girl. Maidservants helped look after the older children, as here (Zumthor 98). The maid has thoroughly cleaned the stones of the courtyard, and her broom and water bucket are prominently displayed.  De Hooch has given us an example of a hardworking servant to set against the idle servants of Maes and Steen.

As will already have become apparent, the portrayal of women relies upon a character cast of stereotypes: the neglectful housewife versus the conscientious housewife, the lazy servant versus the hardworking servant. This reliance upon stereotypes extends throughout Dutch genre painting. Soldiers are generally depicted as dissolute and rowdy, peasants as rebellious and boorish, doctors and dentists as charlatans, schoolmasters as ignorant and brutal. Women are divided into unmarried girls, married women, pious old ladies, maidservants and prostitutes. This stereotyping reflects the prejudices of the dominant social class, the prosperous middle class. An additional factor was that, for the first time in European art, most paintings were now produced for the market, to be sold through art dealers, not commissioned by individual patrons. The situations and character types shown in genre paintings had to be instantly recognisable to guarantee a quick sale. 

The different social classes in the Dutch Republic to some extent shared a common culture, based on the Bible, popular traditions and proverbs (like the proverbs alluded to in Steen’s The Effects of Intemperance). This meant that most people could read the meanings of the paintings, which reflected the culture. As Alison Kettering says, many women must have been conditioned by the male-dominated society in which they lived, which meant that they too adopted its values (Kettering 111). Life was regulated by commonly accepted norms of behaviour, and one of the functions of art was to reinforce these norms. Genre paintings were not snapshots of reality, but offered commentaries on it, with examples of good and bad behaviour. The humorous depictions of bad behaviour – quarrelling, drunkenness, dishonesty, promiscuity – were often presented as characteristic of the lower classes, helping to affirm the superiority of the middle classes. 

    

Gerard ter Borch, Curiosity, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

After about 1650, there was a movement away from such moral and clear-cut messages, at least in the work of a few artists. Many of the paintings now have a mysterious and ambiguous quality, with a new emphasis on aesthetic beauty, and some of the paintings deal with love and courtship. Examples of these trends can be found in the work of Gerard ter Borch (1617-81). Ter Borch’s Curiosity seems to present a narrative, but leaves us to puzzle over what is actually happening. The standing lady in the satin dress appears to have delivered a letter to the lady sitting at the table, who is now writing a reply. The maid (?) is spying over her shoulder to read what she is writing. Even the little dog seems to want to know what is in the letter. The maid may be in collusion with the lady in the satin dress. Perhaps the letter is a love letter to a gentleman, who secretly prefers the lady in the satin dress, but all this is pure speculation. However, this kind of fantasising may well be the way in which contemporaries viewed such paintings, because, as Alison Kettering points out, the tradition of ekphrasis (literary description) encouraged contemporaries to give such “expansive narratives” when describing paintings (Kettering 109-110). Like many Dutch paintings, Curiosity depicts some ladies on their own, without any men present, and displays an interest in women’s thoughts and feelings. But it also presents a stereotyped view of women, their petty jealousies and inquisitiveness. It differs from the other paintings we have looked at, in that the setting is much grander. As Wayne Franits points out, such magnificent fireplaces and chandeliers could only have been afforded by the very wealthiest families (Franits Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting 186-187).

Gerard ter Borch, A Woman Drinking Wine with a Sleeping Soldier, Private Collection

Johannes Vermeer, A Girl Asleep at a Table, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Artists like Ter Borch felt free to play with the conventions of genre painting. A standard format showed a man, often a soldier, trying to seduce a woman by offering her coins or a glass of wine. Ter Borch creates an amusing variant of this in his Woman Drinking Wine with a Sleeping Soldier. The soldier is now too drunk to care, leaving the woman to finish the wine by herself. This painting can be compared with Girl Asleep at a Table by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75). It looks at first that the girl (who is clearly drunk, with a wine glass and a wine jug in front of her) has been sitting alone, but if we look carefully we can see a man’s stick lying on the table and a man’s coat hanging behind the door. It seems as though the man has got up and left the room, drunkenly leaving the door open behind him. Perhaps he felt an urgent need to go somewhere after drinking all that wine. Like many of Vermeer’s paintings, Girl Asleep at a Table depicts a woman on her own, and the viewer of the painting can spy on the sleeping woman. It would not be wrong to say that there is an element of voyeurism here, something which is true of many Dutch paintings. Other examples would be Steen’s paintings of women pulling their stockings on.

Johannes Vermeer, A Woman Holding a Balance, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Pieter de Hooch, A Woman Weighing Coins, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin 

 Many painters after about 1650 tended to make less use of symbolism. Vermeer created a strange and haunting painting of A Woman Holding a Balance, in which a picture of the Last Judgement (hanging behind the woman) may act as a commentary on the woman’s action in weighing the gold coins and the pearls. However, Vermeer has only used one symbol here (the Last Judgement), not a multitude of symbols as in a painting by Steen. A Woman Holding a Balance has been subject to a bewildering variety of interpretations, but some contemporaries might have seen it as a condemnation of the love of worldly goods. However, Vermeer has portrayed a housewife, not an old miser or a tax collector, and this somehow makes the painting more enigmatic and less judgemental.  Pieter de Hooch was inspired by Vermeer’s painting to create a similar work of his own, A Woman Weighing Coins, and in this painting by De Hooch there is no reference to the Last Judgement or any other moral reference - just a lovely painting of a lady weighing coins in a spacious room.

All the paintings of Vermeer and De Hooch have tremendous beauty of colour and lighting, and the compositions are arranged with meticulous care. The subjects are more ambiguous and the moral messages less obvious than in the work of earlier Dutch artists. It could almost be said that the style is more important than the subject, except that the style is greatly assisted by the subject. Women were expected to be placid and domesticated, and this stereotype helped Vermeer and De Hooch to create such tranquil and tidy interiors. In Dutch, the word “schoon” means both “clean” and “beautiful”, and there is an intimate link between beauty and domesticity in Dutch culture.

In the work of some later artists such as Eglon van der Neer (1634-1703) and Matthijs Naiveu (1647-1726), wonderful interiors and fashionable costumes became the main subjects of genre painting. As Sir William Temple noted, the Dutch loved to spend money on “the fabric, adornment, or furniture of their houses” (Hollander 177), and after about 1650 there was a growing trend, among those who could afford it, for opulent and costly interiors. Fashionably-dressed ladies were seen as an essential element of these interiors. As Lisa Vergara says, “the image of a burgher woman at home and at leisure itself signified wealth” (Vergara 69). There was also a movement away from the rough and boisterous subjects of earlier genre paintings, perhaps because these subjects were seen as out of keeping with elegant and refined interiors.   

Pieter de Hooch, The Linen Cupboard, National Gallery, London

Even Pieter de Hooch can be seen as part of this trend, since he left Delft and moved to Amsterdam to earn more money by working for a more upmarket clientele. His painting of The Linen Cupboard illustrates the life the upper middle classes aspired to. It shows a spotless and well-appointed interior, with paintings, a classical statue, a piece of blue-and-white china, a floor of marble squares, and a cupboard for linen. The view through the open door shows us that this is clearly a good address, situated on one of Amsterdam’s prestigious grachten (canals). The lady of the house (wearing a fur-trimmed black jacket) is being assisted by her maidservant (or daughter?) to take linen from the cupboard. This action shows a proper attention to duty and an advertisement of propriety, since all the best houses had a well-stocked linen cupboard - and also a china cupboard (Zumthor 61). There is a key in the cupboard door to safeguard the precious linen. In such paintings De Hooch created a paradigm of upwardly mobile, middle class domesticity, a sphere controlled by women.

Works Cited

Brown, Christopher, Scenes of Everyday Life: Dutch Genre Painting of the Seventeenth Century (London: Faber & Faber, 1984)

Franits, Wayne, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2004)

Franits, Wayne, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993)

Hollander, Martha, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Berkeley: California UP, 2002)

Honig, Elizabeth Alice, “The Space of Gender in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting” in Wayne Franits (editor) Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997)

Kettering, Alison McNeil, “Ter Borch’s Ladies in Satin” in Wayne Franits (editor) Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) pp.98-115

Mandel, Oscar, The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1996)

Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988) 

Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Fontana, 1991)

Vergara, Lisa, “Perspectives on Women in the Art of Vermeer” in Wayne Franits (editor) The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) pp.54-72

Zumthor, Paul, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994)