This section is from the book "Dutch And Flemish Furniture", by Esther Singleton. Also available from Amazon: Dutch and Flemish Furniture.
Omitting the cellar and store-rooms, we pass upstairs to the bedroom of the master and mistress on the second floor. Pictures, chiefly family portraits, adorn the walls. The floor is of wood, highly polished, and so slippery that great care is required in walking across it. The furniture consists of chairs with tall backs and low seats, a carved table with a tapestry or rug cover, a large oak cabinet and a cupboard on four legs, the treasure-chest and the wash-buffet, with wash-mops and toilet appliances. A heavy green damask curtain hangs before the bed, which is so high above the floor that it must be entered with the aid of a small step-ladder that stands in one corner of the room next to the brass warming-pan. Sometimes a cradle, called "coach," for the baby stands at the foot and sometimes under the bed.
These beds have often been ridiculed. The bedstead, however, soon supplanted the panelled bed, although it has never banished it altogether.
The inventory of Gertrude van Mierevelt (1639), wife of the painter Van Mierevelt of Delft who died in 1638, gives an excellent idea of a comfortable Dutch home of the early seventeenth century. First should be mentioned six beds with handsome draperies, tapestries, rich furniture covers, and other woollen articles (wol-legoet), that prove how much the artist and his wife liked rich textiles. The Tinnewerk, consisting of plates, dishes, salt-cellars, etc., shows that the table-service was of pewter, although twenty-eight articles in porcelain and faience, consisting of plates, bowls and dishes, valued at about twenty-six florins, are also enumerated. The house also contained a great many copper articles and utensils, from tongs and shovels to those fine re-poussee dishes so highly prized to-day by collectors; and there was a considerable amount of iron-ware, including two lanterns. There were some statues in plaster, including a "Suzanne," ninety-four paintings, chiefly religious, and family portraits, although one representing "Pomona and Flora" is mentioned. The artist also had some violins, a little book of engravings, some wooden panels, and a library of thirty-seven volumes.
Many of these were illustrated, and dealt with religious and historical subjects; and as they were all in Dutch it would seem that the artist could read no other language. Especially noticeable is the fine collection of linen, the pride of the mistress. She had no less than twenty-five pairs of sheets, a hundred and eighteen serviettes and fifteen tablecloths, one of which fetched as much as fifteen florins at the sale in 1639, and another of damask (damast taefellaecken), twenty florins. The most important room of the home of a burgher of moderate means was the hall, or general living-room. This, as so many pictures show, had a great fireplace, at which meals were often cooked. The furniture consisted of tables, chairs, cabinets, and, very frequently, a bed. The chimney-piece is massive, high and often elaborately carved, and above it a landscape, fruit piece, Kermesse, flower-piece or battle-scene by a favourite painter, is hung to form part of the decoration. This chimney-piece is, moreover, filled with porcelain dishes, cups, plates, tea-pots and curios. Below it hangs an ornamental chimney cloth embroidered with gaily-coloured flowers, red or green silk, white muslin, or figured calico.
The hearth is framed in blue and white tiles, furnished with an iron fire-back and supplied with brass and irons, racks for the fire-irons, pot-hooks, spits, a crane on which a large brass kettle hangs, and small hooks from which the bellows, hearth brooms, shovel, tongs, etc., hang conveniently for use. A brass or copper warming-pan is not far away. The walls are adorned with pictures, a large looking-glass in an ebony frame, a wall-board with hooks for small cans and jugs and a plate rack or two in which some handsome plates and dishes are formally arranged. A great linen press, or kas, filled with tablecloths and napkins, the head of which is decorated with large Japanese beakers and smaller cups and vases, stands on one side of the room, and a glass case filled with tea-pots, cups and saucers, dishes, etc., and an East India cabinet on the other. A gaudily-painted Hindeloopen clock ticks on the wall. A large table stands in the centre of the room, covered with a heavy Turkish rug or "carpet," and several little tables are conveniently disposed.
The Russia leather, Turkey work and matted chairs are symmetrically arranged around the walls beneath the many pictures of landscape, interiors or still-life. The windows are curtained, the hangings of red or green striped silk or flowered calico matching those of the bedstead, which can be completely closed like a large box. On the four corners of the cornice of this bed are bunches of feathers or a painted wooden ornament. The casement windows have tiny diamond-shaped or round panes set in lead, and on the outside creepers and roses are carefully trained, forming a beautiful framework. Upon the sills stand flower-pots in which a bright tulip or other favourite flower is blooming.
The first apartment entered from the front door of a merchant's house was the "voorhuis," or front room, where visitors were formally received. This was more or less handsomely furnished in accordance with the means of the owner. It was usually a sort of hall, sometimes of considerable dimensions.
A "voorhuis," as it appears in an inventory of 1686, contains a very handsome marble table with a carved wooden frame, a table covered with a handsome cloth, and a very fine tall clock. The seats consisted of seven Russia leather chairs and one matted chair furnished with a cushion. The room was lighted with three glass windows with leaden frames, handsomely curtained, and eleven pictures decorated the walls. The value of this furniture was £125 in present money.
In many houses the second floor was only used for "show rooms," and the family slept in either the lower or the top floor. Bernagie writes: "If you go through the town, you will find many houses where the husband is afraid so much as even to smell at his second floor rooms. They always remain downstairs. Have they ever so many courtly rooms, they will eat, for their wives' sake, in the small back kitchen."
 
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