An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art & Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt.

Martha Hollander. An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. xvi + 264 pp. index. illus. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-520-22135-4.

Mariet Westermann. Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt. Zwolle, The Netherlands: Waanders Publishers, 2001. 240 pp. illus. bibl. $29.95. ISBN: 0-914738-46-1.

Seventeenth-century Dutch images of domestic interiors, the settings of both genre paintings and many portraits, have in our own time become almost synonymous with "home." Emanuel de Wirte's Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals, for example, graces the cover of Wirold Rybczynski's popular 1986 Home: A Short History of An Idea. Indeed, these paintings have served as the basis for period room reconstructions in museums (Art and Home reproduces a 1964 installation photograph from the Centraal Museum, Utrecht), nor to mention the showrooms of countless antique dealers.

The two books reviewed here disrupt our received view of these cozy interiors. While these images have been productively investigated for their iconographic associations since Eddy de Jongh's ground breaking studies of the late 1960s, until recently, art historians have nor given much sustained thought to other aspects of these interiors. The two publications under review are complementary studies of some of these other aspects: their structure, and the material basis of their contents. Hollander's study analyzes the aesthetic of the formal structure of these rooms. Westermann's Art and Home examines these images against the material culture of the time: actual interiors themselves and the objects that adorn them.

Martha Hollander's An Entrance for the Eyes scrutinizes an aspect of the formal structure and contents of these lovingly depicted interiors: the views through windows or doors, reflections in mirrors, and the maps, prints, and paintings decorating walls, all of which insert additional scenes into a room. Iconographic readings of individual paintings by previous scholars have used these subsidiary scenes to interpret the primary subject. Hollander provides a new perspective on these works by excavating the visual history and rhetorical underpinnings to the structure of this process. These secondary scenes, she observes, are a visual parallel to traditional scholastic methods of argument, whereby points are furthered by elaboration, comparison, or opposition. Tracing a visual tradition from medieval manuscripts through farmhouse interiors and taverns peopled by peasants, Hollander observes that these representations became highly complex in the second half of the seventeenth century as figures in expensive dre ss and courtly poses inhabit elegant settings. The more elaborate structures of these later images offer additional or alternative spaces for meaning-making which, when compared and contrasted with the main scene, multiply the possibilities for witty plays of reference constructed by the viewer. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are organized around works representing the different conventions of Gerard Dou, Nicolaes Maes, and Pierer de Hooch, respectively. Through Dou's work Hollander examines the niche format, curtains and background scenes, vistas through doorways, pictures within pictures, and mirrors. Paintings by Maes focus our attention on settings located on different spatial levels, viewed through passages running up or down staircases. Images by de Hooch invite a consideration of the gendering of spaces in the relation of interiors to exteriors. The book closes with a meditation on such public interiors as the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, and the town hall and stock exchange in Amsterdam. Hollander's wonderfully evocat ive prose richly rewards. For readers habituated to viewing these complex images primarily for their iconographic content, Hollander returns us to the sheer pleasure of viewing, and a fresh appreciation for the structures of meaning production through the play of setting against setting.

Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt is the catalogue to a highly successful exhibition organized by Mariet Westermann for the Denver Art Museum and Newark Museum. In addition to entries on neatly 150 genre paintings and portraits, prints, decorative objects, and books, important essays by Westermann, C. Willemijn Fock, Eric Jan Sluijter, and H. Perry Chapman consider these images against detailed studies of material objects, material practice (the contents and arrangement of actual seventeenth-century interiors), and 1950s sitcoms and twenty-first-century advertisements. In doing so, this book provides refreshing new perspectives upon the psychological and cultural function of these familiar images.

Westermann's essay compares and contrasts the material settings and objects in Dutch seventeenth-century genre paintings and portraits with the domestic settings of contemporary consumer-oriented photographs created by Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, and Martha Stewart. H. Perry Chapman likens the activities depicted in these paintings to mid-twentieth-century television situation comedies including Leave it to Beaver and All in the Family. These wonderfully imaginative juxtapositions transform our perceptions of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings into visions both more strange, and less. Rather than offering passive depictions of domestic life, or even of domestic ideals, these images are enlivened as social commentary. In the process they become more familiar, as we almost viscerally experience their role in producing the psychic fabric of daily existence. At the same time, Westermann and Chapman underscore the large cultural gap between the function of these images in their time and that of popular adver tisements and television in ours. As works that could command high prices, and in a culture much less saturated with man-made visual imagery than ours, these paintings are far removed from the free television images that we can turn off, or popular advertisements that we quickly discard.

In addition to comparing these images with interiors represented in the popular culture of our own time, Westermann and Chapman's complementary essays make some important observations about some of the themes that run through these paintings. Westermann notes the gradual separation of the home into spaces for different activities, and points out that domestic spaces are governed by women in genre images, by men in portraits. Both Chapman and Westermann note that due in part to settings and interior appointments, female contemplation seems to be differently represented than that of men.

Many of these images may be said to promote social ideals either directly, or indirectly through the use of humor; in more luxurious interiors themes appear to move unsurely between a social ideal and a moral warning. This ambiguity, Chapman suggests, highlights contested areas of social structure. Specifically, the middle-class nuclear family, which had long been understood as the basis of the social fabric, seems to have become a subject for images at a time in which the center of the state was being moved from monarchs and aristocrats to the middle-class family, and new forms of social and political life were evolving.

Among the most exciting developments of contemporary research is the consideration of these images against extensive investigation currently being undertaken into material culture. Inventories of painting collections are customarily used to trace the provenance of individual paintings. Painstaking studies of household inventories by Marten Jan Bok, Willemijn Fock, John Loughman, John Michael Montias, and others now confirm contemporary travelers' accounts of the large number of Dutch collections, and their considerable size. Eric Jan Sluijter's detailed essay, a study of the inventories of two wealthy Leiden burghers, Protestant Franciscus de le Boe Sylvius and Catholic Hendrick Bugge van Ring, is a model of how these inventories now can be utilized to further our understanding of the cultural function of these images. Identifying many inventory entries with known paintings, Sluijter vividly lays out the parameters of these collections' themes and style, and how and where different subjects were displayed in the home. It gives pause to consider how Bugge van Ring, who owned a total of 237 paintings, could have fit several bookcases and sixty-four paintings into a room measuring twenty-six by seventeen feet. Sylvius owned eleven paintings by the fijnschilder (fine painter) Gerard Dou, six ofwhich are described as set into protective cases--long since lost. These enclosures suggest a context for their viewing: cases gingerly opened, images gazed upon, perhaps discussed with a companion, and then carefully shut away. The subject of some of these representations owned by Sylvius, a large finely-painted Quack Doctor by Gerard Dou and a smaller coarser one byAdriaen Brouwer, also tell us something about the sense of humor of this celebrated physician.

The meticulous study of inventories now also gives us hard data with which to compare the settings of these domestic scenes with the interiors of actual homes. Juxtaposing images such as Emanuel de Witte's Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals cited above with information from inventories, published floor plans, and surviving homes, Willemijn Fock demonstrates that de Wine--and many other painters of domestic interiors--took imaginative liberties with decorative appointments, architectural materials, and room arrangement. In de Wirte's interior, for example, ceiling beams run at 90 degrees to the street facade rather than parallel with it as constructed in urban houses; rooms facing the street are much wider than possible in narrow urban dwellings; depicted views through a sequence of rooms and doorways were seldom possible; and patterned marble floors and brass chandeliers--among the most common features of Dutch genre paintings of the second half of the seventeenth century--were rare items in actual h ouses. Of the surviving inventories of the elite residences of Leiden's Rapenburg, for example, only five brass chandeliers are mentioned over the entire century; they do not even appear in the inventories of the homes of some of the richest families in Amsterdam. Although urban elites, as well as the princes of Orange, could well afford marble floors, inventories indicate that they preferred equally expensive wooden floors - leaving marble to grace the halls of public buildings. Fock suggests that these discrepancies between an image and actual interiors gave the artist an opportunity to display their skill at rendering perspective, and the sheen and texture of a variety of materials. In her introductory essay, Wesrermann also observes that many of these variants from reality produce a more refined and geometrically-ordered space, convey the spirit of an idealized household, and imaginatively posit the home as a space of rationality and order.

While more than three centuries separate us from seventeenth-century moralists, Chapman points out that these ideals survive in contemporary texts. She closes her essay with a quotation from Charyl Mendelson's 1999 Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping Home: "It is your housekeeping that makes your home alive.., the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else" (7; quoted by Chapman in Wesrermann, 152).