Dress and Status in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer

please join me in welcoming today's speaker pamela perm all right Thank You jasmine and good afternoon everyone it's my really great pleasure to be able to speak to you about Dutch dress today but I have to admit I'm actually not much of an authority on Dutch dress and I in all honesty I don't think anyone really can be an authority on Dutch dress and that's really because so little has actually survived so really what we know about Dutch fashion and costume relies on what we find in paintings and written resources so that's what I want to really focus on today is what do the paintings that we see in the ex that beautiful exhibition downstairs tell us about Dutch fashion and also what do they not tell us about Dutch fashion what what about it that is not obvious when we look at the paintings but maybe we can find out from other sources so that's really the theme of today's lecture and to start I wanted to focus on this image which is the cover of the catalog which I think is a really good entry into a discussion on fashion in Dutch painting of course most of you know the limp the image from the publication and the catalog and it's wonderful because it actually shows three different classes and it was part of the section on the show on classes mixing together the itinerant merchants in the doorway of course the lady of the house who sits at the left and then the figure on the right side who was actually a maid in the house and I think for some people for us today her role as a maid might not be too clear she and the seated woman are wearing very similar garments shirts or jackets and skirts with white aprons they look rather similar but of course someone in Holland in the 17th century would have known immediately that the women on the side wasn't made and she would have won would have known that of course by probably the materials out of which the garments are made and I think in the Dutch paintings cloth is incredibly important to me a lot of these paintings are all about the cloth and the way in which the artist depicts the cloth so I wanted to talk begin this talk talking about textiles and why they look the way they do in the paintings what about the way that they're made and the fibers gives them the characteristics that these artists were so brilliant at achieving on canvas now the woman on the left of course is probably wearing silk a lighter silk top that I think is probably lined it's not quilted but it's probably has an a batting inside like a silk silk batting which would make it extra warm she's wearing a heavier silk skirt of course trimmed with gold so these are really kind of key elements which give us her status the maid on the right I think she's wearing a linen bodice which has probably died with indigo this would be a much more practical garment it would be easier to clean the dark blue indigo would not show up the stain so well so something that a servant would wear and her skirt to me looks like it's probably wool a red wool and they're both wearing linen aprons which I'll talk about a little later now this portrait I think is a great example of you know how textiles show different classes another portrait that's in the exhibition that my eye as an interesting study of cloth is the portrait of the Kerr Kovan family which shows many different types of cloth and most of them woven with silk I should stop here a bit and make a distinction between the fiber out of which something is woven and the structure in which it is woven so the main fibers that you find in Hull and at this time are wool silk and linen linen is very important the Dutch economy I think they really built their economy on the linen trade in the medieval period and even earlier there was a lot of linen cultivated in Flanders in Germany that was sent to the Netherlands where it was processed and woven and finally bleached and I'll get to that a little while later so linen is very important silk of course was traded from the east I think first through Turkey through those trade routes and then once the Dutch began trading through with the global shipping trade from China and the Far East wool came probably locally as well as from England the English were great exporters of wool that was one of their their main exports so you would find it coming in from there now this portrait of course because of the wealth of the family shows them all wearing silk garments and one thing I want to say too is some of these garments to my eye don't look like things somebody in the Netherlands in the 17th century would have actually worn I think especially in the the costume that some of the men are wearing I think growing in the 17th century and into the 18th century there's a growing fashion for creating portraits that are more timeless so you would put the subjects into more classical dress and not into the really fashionable textiles of the day because fashion changes so the portrait would not look so timeless anymore and there is also part of this trend is the painters is I think preference for painting on patterns silks like you see in the painting here so you don't see in the paintings downstairs a lot of pattern silks and again I'll show you the few few paintings that have those silks in them a little bit later but this detail I want to focus on and talk about the different structures that are used in with silk and these textile structures can you can weave any fibers in these structures so the first one I want to talk about is a plain weave which is the very simplest of the weave structures and that if you look at the young man getting in the at the top right who is wearing the kind of aubergine or brown colored silk shirt that to me looks like a plain weave cloth probably a taffeta which is a lighter crisper cloth and here's a detail showing his shirt those of you who are familiar with taffeta can kind of see that quality that the artist has been able to achieve that that crispness in the way that it drapes on the body it doesn't kind of drape cleanly on the body there's those folds in there that are characteristic of that crisper fabric now the diagram on the right shows you a plane wave which is the simplest over-and-under over one under one structure and the warp yarns which are the yarns that are through on the loom they're placed on the loom and the weft yarns are interlaced with it by the weaver kind of over one under one so that's the most basic structure that's the plain weave another basic structure is a satin weave and the young woman to the left of the painting she is wearing satin cloth and satin is a structure where the warp floats over four or more weft yarns so and the binding points are in kind of scattered different intervals and you get a very smooth surface on the on the cloth itself and those silk yarns are very reflective so that is one reason why with satin you get that much smoother appearance than the plain weave taffeta and the light reflects off the silk in such wonderful ways you can have a cotton satin you can have a linen satin you can have a wool satin but silk is the most effective yarn in creating a satin weave there's also a softer drape to satin because you don't have as many binding points in the weave itself so her outfit is satin another weave that you find in this painting is velvet weave which the artist so beautifully depicted in the clothing of the parents the Kirk Kove and mr. and mrs. Kerr Kovan and you see with velvet is characterized by a pile and like unlike the other two structures I showed you there was one warp and one weft in velvet weave you have a supplementary weft it's each pile weft which you see from the top to the bottom is wound on a separate bobbin that's held at the back of the Loom and pulled into the structure when needed so just very briefly the Weaver would do three weft shots of plain weave and then the pile warp would be brought up and over a rod that's inserted by the Weaver once the Weaver does like three more rows of plain weave and locks in that pile warp you can actually pull out the rod and if you don't kind of cut the top of the loop before that you have an uncut pile which is a loop on the surface of the cloth most of the rods have a small groove at the top where you can easily run a knife over it so in that way the loops are slashed and that creates the pile so you can see the cut yarns below and then pulling out the rod above so it's a very time-consuming weaving technique so and it uses twice more than twice as much silk when you're weaving it so velvet was a very very expensive cloth during this period now velvet can be woven kind of plain velvet as you see here but also if you look closely at some of the portraits you'll notice some of them are wearing cloth that looks like a pattern develop it and in this portrait of the the syndics from the Amsterdam Goldsmith skilled the man on the left is actually wearing a pattern develop it it's like technically known as a voided velvet because you have usually a satin ground with the pattern coming out on top of it and I pulled out from the collection a fragment of avoided velvet that is in the museum's collection which you see on the right and this is a satin ground that's kind of deteriorating so you see some holes in there but you see the pattern is created using a pile and also a cut and uncut pile so the two of them there are combined the duller areas in the middle of the flower rats are the uncut pile and the blacker areas are the cut pile because once those you cut the loops they kind of fringe up and create this really rich deep quality that you see in velvet now another force structure that I haven't mentioned which is a very basic structure is called is a twill weave and I don't think you really see that in the Kerr covin family portrait most often twill was used in wool to weave wool cloth especially broadcloth and it's probably the structure that is used to make Constantine Hugin doublet and hose that you see here and it was a structure that is a kind of a slightly more complicated than the plain weave because the weft will pass under a number of warps and then over another number and each subsequent weft will shift so you get this real diagonal that's created this twill is a 2 to 12 so it's under twill over twill shifting 1 1 warp over and which is why you see that diagonal and it like the satin you get a longer float on the surface of the cloth and the wool fiber is characterized by the fact that the fiber itself has a lot of scales on it so you can felt will very easily and create a very impermeable surface which is what happens with broadcloth and the doublet that Hugin is wearing it's would be very practical for an outdoor garment because the lanlan and the wool would keep moisture from going through it plus it would be a very durable fabric so this kind of twill broadcloth is something you see a lot in menswear in the 17th and 18th century even it does continue on now the along with all these plain fabrics of course there's also pattern fabrics which are very common in the 17th century we have you know cabinets full of fragments of pattern fabrics from the 17th century we know that they were around we know that a lot of people wore them but if he went through the exhibition downstairs you probably wouldn't come out thinking that there are a few paintings in the show that do depict pattern pattern fragments but I can kind of sympathize with the painters who one wouldn't want to be there kind of you know with these ditzy little designs and creating the paintings so the two daughters in this painting both are wearing pattern silks the the girl the standing girl has a striped silk and the other lady has a pattern silk and this is a an example in the museum's collection which i think is very similar to the one that you see here it has a satin ground and is patterned with a supplementary left that goes all the way across the fabric and is brought up when you need the color and actually I don't know if you can see it in the slide but at the bottom you can kind of see a pink stripe that goes all the way a cloth across and then a blue stripe above that that's the it's a very thin fabric so you can see that left from the that's on going across the back of the fabric kind of coming through to the face of the fabric and it's a this fabric has a very soft hand so it's something that could have easily been sewn into this dress with this very complicated pleading in where the skirt joins to the bodice but this gives you an example of the kind of fat pattern fabrics that were probably quite popular and there were probably a lot of people wearing and this kind of silk in the mid 17th century now another painting where you can see a pattern silk is this this one by Raven Stein of the officers of the white flag and the gentleman in the middle and I want to get his right name for you Isaac snoo ins is pictured wearing another patterned silk and it turns out that he was actually a silk merchant so it kind of makes sense that he would insist that he be depicted in this garment and you see him and what's also fun about this painting and this doublet is the fact that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a doublet in their collection which is very similar I think when you start looking at the details in terms of the pink tape that binds each of the straps in the in the sleeve and even the little epaulette at the top you can see the same pink tape that's been used there it's a really wonderful comparison and I think approves the point that these garments were actually worn and there were probably a lot more in the 17th century than we're aware of or that paintings would provide a clue toward so I think it's important when we look at these fabrics too or at the paintings to really be familiar with the types of fabrics that were worn and we can you know I think even appreciate the paintings more but also get a better sense of you know what costume in the 17th century was really like and that what people where were wearing was much broader than the choices made by the painters and the subjects and the painter's paintings it was a bit of a different story I think on the street and on the canvas now I want to talk for the rest of this presentation I want to discuss a few other aspects of costume that I think come across when you look at the paintings and then another topic that is something that you really don't get from the paintings but I think is important when thinking about Dutch costumes during this period and I think I'll start this discussion with this really wonderful painting of Dom Square and if you look carefully at all of the figures in the painting you really get the sense of what a cultural kind of cross-cultural meeting place this square was and all of the different types of people's who met here not only different social classes but also people from different cultures people from the city people from the provinces all coming together in a place like Amsterdam and I pulled out a couple of details of individuals from the painting just to give you a sense of the the variety of people that are depicted in the painting of course in the upper left as a maid one of the servant girls who's probably out doing her shopping in the middle or some merchants or who are discussing business in the square a peasant on the right who has you know brought his wood in to sell at the markets there's a more aristocratic wealthy couple on the bottom left and we know that because she's wearing a full-length dress which is something that really only very wealthy woman were able to afford and wear and in the middle are what looked like a few Turkish merchants who may have been in Amsterdam at the time from and with the trade going on and on the right I think you see a couple probably from the provinces and that is their more regional style of dress that they have you know come into the city wearing and and so so the picture really does give you a sense of this wide diversity of costume that was going on at the time and I think also in probably the lectures you've heard previously may have talked a lot about the trade that was going on and all of the people that were coming into the city because of that also the wealth that was coming into the Netherlands because of the trade and that wealth allowed a lot of people to dress in fancy fancier clothes afford better fabrics and this created kind of a lot of I think unease social and ease to see people dressing above their station or and and people really kind of wanted to stick to the status quo and I think part of what you're seeing in especially the genre pay is an attempt to preserve that status quo and so I think painting those genre paintings actually provide a fairly good indication of what what people were wearing the types of clothing that people were wearing they also helped to kind of classify different types of dress and I think the idea of classification is something that's very important during this period especially in Holland along with the trade there are also a lot of knowledge is coming in about different cultures about the natural world and people are beginning to think about all this document it and I couldn't resist putting in this image of the the tulip which of course came from Turkey it's really the the beginning of the botanical drawings that you see during this period and this beautiful work by Jakob Mauro there also leads to like Linnaeus classification systems which develop in the 18th century this is very much a part of the culture and the idea of classifying costume is also something that you see even in the 16th century that goes on into the 17th century and you see a lot of engravings and printed books that really look at costume and they look at costume in the sense of kind of the costume of different cultures this is a book by Julius Goldsmith's and it shows you a costume from various people from throughout the world and this is a plate that shows you a dress from Turkish women what they might they wore at the period but along with the dress from peoples of different parts of the world the book also contains plates of people from different social classes this plate shows you peasant dress from different regions around the Netherlands and the Flanders the man in the middle I think is from Brabant and to his right is a peasant from Flanders and then to his right is another peasant from Belgium so there these books are part of this urge to classify to kind of preserve the status quo so people we'll continue to dress the way they should and not mix these social classes and I think in Holland there's a lot written about this and for some reason The Maids really I think bear the brunt of what you find in the publication's they're constantly being accused of dressing above their station and which kind of brings us back to this portrait and clearly the maid in this portrait is not dressing above her station she is very much of her of her class and and her role as a maid is it's quite clear or would have been to a seventeenth-century viewer and I I want to come back to this painting from for another reason too because I want to talk about linen and linen in the Netherlands as I said before was a very important commodity it was also a very important aspect of dress and linen on a number of levels one of which was that it it was the basic undergarment was made of linen there was a shirt that was worn by men and a chemise that was worn by women and linen unlike silk and wool was very easily cleaned so you could the poor person might have two shirts one could be in the wash and they could wear the other one and clean linen was extremely important to the Dutch and it was equated with kind of a moral the cleaner your linen was the the better person you were so this was an important aspect of the Dutch culture and the finer the linen you had the wealthier you were was also an aspect of it and I think in this painting you can see you can see that in in different ways which I think either you further underscores the the class structure in the painting itself both women you can't really see their chemises this they don't really become visible until later in the 17th century and that itself causes some scam but they where they both word linen aprons and the seated figure it's no it's a very translucent cloth it's a really fine fine linen not a very practical apron that she has on and you can contrast this with the apron that the maid is wearing which is a much denser stiffer fabric it's also a bit grayer to my eye when I look at it it's not as you know kind of brilliant white as the linen that the woman on the left is wearing if you also look you can see the colors of the men's shirts for the musicians in the background of the painting and they are just gray so I think here even in the brightness of the linen you're seeing the different social classes being revealed in in that context now as I said before linen was an important commodity and I just wanted to bring in this wonderful painting by Van Arsdale of the bleaching fields in Harlem and the idea of bleaching linen was extremely important as you know the brighter the whiter the linen the better so the bleaching in Harlem they were very famous for how white they could get the cloth and from what I read it could take months to to bleach the fibers to create that very brilliant white they didn't really understand chemical bleaching like chlorine bleach and borax until the 19th century so they didn't have access to that kind of chemicals so a lot of this was done with sunlight and through various baths I read somewhere that they actually used buttermilk that they would be the textiles in buttermilk and then set them out in the Sun to bleach and you would do this kind of repeatedly until you've got the whiteness that you needed but the bleaching fields in Harlem they were well known for the the whiteness that they could get their claws it also amazes me to think about how they kept bugs off how they kept animals from running on them how they kept them clean it's just kind of extraordinary that they they were able to achieve that and then going back to this painting again thinking about the linens and I kind of already said what I was gonna say about it so we'll move on to this next one which is the idea of the actual the cleanliness keeping the linens crisp and clean and maintaining them which is what you know this servant is doing in the basement of her home or where she lives ironing the linen on the table therefore probably some kind of fashionable accessory which were another important way in which linen was utilized in the 17th century and in the maintenance of the linen I think this drawing from vanta venez series of drawings is really about it's not the bleaching fields of Harlem I think this is a wash day and the two women with the in the foreground with the ruffs and the standing collars are probably the women of the household who are overseeing the washing and bleaching of the the family Linens and in the background you see the servants who are working on the the bigger pieces one way I read to tell the difference between the maids and the mistress of the house is the maids often had blue aprons and the mistress of the house had the white apron also a maid would never have been able to afford that kind of standing collar that you see in the front but here on the ground you can see some of the those linens the shirts and the longer shimmies here and then also collars and cuffs and ruffs and the different kind of fashionable accessories I don't think you would have seen this melange of types of things in the the bleaching fields in Harlem I think this is probably a family laundry but the amount of time and effort put into laundry was something big and the value of linen in the household I think this this points to the care the value and the importance of linen in the Dutch household and in fashion and so I went from here I want to talk a little bit about some of these accessories because it amazes me that these two women in the foreground could actually be out there wearing those standing collars it's really quite extraordinary because we see a similar color in this painting by armed guard Elizabeth's band dorth who was a member of the aristocracy and from what I read in the the catalog the aristocratic portraits were all about wealth and money and position and I think this portrait is certainly about that the collar itself is made of again this very very fine linen that they could achieve this translucent linen that is pleated and then has a bobbin lace attached around it or needle lace it's it's unclear it's not that carefully detailed here but lace was actually also made of linen because the the in Flanders they were able to achieve a very very fine linen thread that could be made into the beautifully refined lace so a lot of the lace in Europe first came from Italy but then once the Flemish started and the Belgians started making lace you see a lot of lace coming out of this area and during the 17th century more and more is incorporated into fashionable dress and I think this is on these standing colours you you begin to see a lot of that she's also wearing I think goes as a part 'let which is on the upper part of her chest you can kind of see a circular wheel pattern in white behind all that jewelry and that's an earlier form of lace called reticello which is something that started in Italy and then moves up so this standing collar I was able to find the out that there were several standing collars that have actually survived in museum collections and this is one from the Clooney Museum in Paris and the collars were actually supported by these wire frames which this is the back of the collar from the Clooney and you can see this wire framework which was known as a super toss and the collars were then stitched to the super toss I think the color that's on this piece now is probably not original I think the super tosses were developed so you could do the main part of the collar to the the center part and then the lace where it came out would be stitched to those kind of tulip like motifs that are at the top of the super toss and I think if you look closely at the portrait of urban guard and look at those those points of lace you can almost see these little white lines behind them I think that may actually be the super toss and you're just seeing it where the lace didn't didn't cover it and wasn't completely stitched down which is an interesting way of looking at that but these were important accessories along with ruffs which were both worn from the 16th century into the 17th century and I think begin to go out of fashion by the 1730's so this is about the time when Herman guards portrait was painted shortly after that they'd be the standing colors begin to go out of fashion but the ruffs continue on for a little while longer and this again the officers of the white flag is wonderful because it shows you as the standing colors go out of fashion and this new kind of falling color becomes much more fashionable and you begin to see that supplant the standing color but the ruffs are still born here and continued to be worn into the 17th century as for officials like in the judiciary lawyers they academics they begin they still continue to wear the ruff in this portrait there are two men with the ruffs on they're very soft kind of ruffed and the other men were the following fallen colors here's a detail of the one of the men with the rough and then a rough from the collection of the Rijksmuseum so you can see this is one has very soft pleats and yards and yards and yards of linen bands were cartridge pleated around the top around the band that would have gone around the neck and sometimes there were layers of bands so you get layers of ruffs and the actual care and maintenance of these was extraordinarily complicated and time-consuming and it was even more difficult this one was fairly simple compared to ruffs like these and you had they were heavily starched and then you had to actually set the pleats in them this is a the Rembrandt painting of Maria bacchanal and the Reverend Ellison and they actually had lived in England so the dress is a little more English her hat is something you would find in England but I think it's a wonderful example of these these stiffer ruffs that were worn and he was a minister in an academic so you have this more sombre dress and just because of the extraordinary excess of some of these ruffs there are a lot of satirical prints and this is a plate from a series called the monkeys and it's depiction of the laundry and but it actually shows you the different stages that were used to clean and then reset the ruffs because once they were brought in they were washed the monkey in the back is actually washing the ruffs and then they were set to dry and then from there they would go to the starters who are on the bottom left they would actually starch the ruffs and what's interesting is historians have discovered that sometimes you could color the starch so sometimes they would have pink ruffs and blue roofs and it's harder to see now but I think there may be one painting down in the show where I noticed somebody wearing a blue ruff so that be like Where's Waldo you can go back to the gallery and see if you can find the blue ruff in the gallery but there you see the starching and then the monkey in the center front is actually setting the rough and to do that they had rods that you would heat and then insert into the the rough to create the pleat and then there was enough starch that it really held its shape and for ruffs that were up to four layers you had to do this for every single layer and it was a it was really they had I think plates that they inserted between layers so that when you were doing one layer you weren't destroying the other layer and kind of ruining the pleats so this this is one area of Dutch fashion which really did go to excess was in the types of accessories that were worn and particularly they drove linen because it was that important now I want to go back to this painting again and talk a little bit about the falling collars because here's where you start to see the lace come in and lace was again a very valuable expensive accessory so it really did denote wealth because it was such a time-consuming thing to make and here I just show you a detail from the painting along with a piece of bobbin lace that's in the museum's collection and this is kind of a crude piece of bobbin lace to be honest with you it's not not so refined in terms of the pattern and the weaving is it's not so crisp and like some of them you find later on but I think it's the kind of lace that you might have seen on a collar worn by this gentleman and it's created in the technique of bobbin lace there are two different ways of making lace there's bobbin lace and needle lace and bobbin lace is sometimes called pillow lace because it's created on a pillow and the threads used to make it are wound onto bobbins which are then plated to create the fabric of the lace itself and bobbin lace often can look like a woven structure because these the threads on the bobbins cross each other as if you weaving and they are done that crossing is you see the bobbins hanging off the the left side on the top of the pillow is usually a parchment drawing a basic outline of the lace pattern and it's pricked with holes into which pins are inserted and the the lace those pins help guide the threads to create the pattern and as the the lace is made and and woven together the threads are the pins are pulled out and then anew then they carry on with making more lace and the rest of it is wound up on the other side so again this is a time-consuming very meticulous job and something I think the people from this region really did excel in so you see the lace maker here in this painting and that's in the exhibition and here's another example of bobbin lace from a slightly later period and the of the style that might have been worn by a woman in the van shootin family portrait here you it's a little more refined kind of denser design than the one we saw before which happens as the century moves on you get these more complicated patterns now needle lace gives you can give you a denser structure and this is a piece of needle lace from about 1630 and it's very similar to another painting that's in the museum's collection you get this this kind of it's a way to your lace than bobbin lace and it's a crisper kind of lace and the bobbin lace is amazing because it's made with a needle and thread and it's a basic buttonhole stitch for those of you who know anything about stitching or embroidery this simply that the needle is wrapped into a previous stitch and brought through and if you pull those stitches tight you can create this very dense fabric so if you can imagine the time involved in creating something like this it's made similar to the the bobbin lace in that it's it's created on a pattern early on it was parchment unto threads were laid just to outline the design in the pattern and then the threads were filled in with this buttonhole stitch and that's how you created this larger design it was then kind of snipped off the parchment and you had the free lace came off of that so when you think about time put into these materials you can begin to understand widely so is so expensive and why it was such a valuable accessory during the 17th and especially into the 18th century I did some work on 18th century lace in the wardrobe of Madame de Pompadour and found out that a full suite of lace accessories for a dress was about as valuable as a suite of diamond sapphire jewelry so it gives you a sense you know of the value of this material at the time it was it was very highly valued an important fashion accessory and then of course there were people who didn't wear such extravagant and elaborate accessories and this painting I see of Abraham castellan and his wife he was I think he was a Mennonite who ran a newspaper and he the Mennonites dressed much more simply and you can see that in the simple white collar worn by he and his wife I think I love the fabric of his suit and I have a feeling it's a wool and silk blend if you mix the two together you get this kind of duller yet wonderful kind of glow to the fabric so that's my theory that this might be a woman silk blend and then just a picture of his wife who after he passed away took over the newspaper and I think became kind of the official printer of Haarlem which is kind of she stepped into that position and I just wanted to point out too at the bottom of her collar are these little linen tassels which I think were quite common in the 17th century it was just a little way of adding some kind of trim to your garment and they they we have a lot of them in the collection for some reason they were they must have been quite popular now a I kind of wanted to discuss linen with you a little bit because I think it's a very important aspect of Dutch costume the other aspect of Dutch costume that I wanted to talk about in more depth was the impact of the the Orient and the trade with Asia and the huge impact it had on the Dutch and on what the Dutch wear which I don't think is something you always see in the portraits themselves so I wanted to discuss that a bit and I just kind of opened this discussion with this wonderful illustration of the the Main Street in Goa in India and this was in a period in the itinerary with which Lin Shelton's book that was published of his voyages with the Portuguese he was the first to kind of publish some of these Portuguese trade routes and allowed the Dutch and a lot of other Europeans to begin to explore this more global trade and and allowed them to really enter into the trade but I think you can it gives you a sense of the exotic world that the Dutch and the Portuguese and Europeans encountered when they began to travel and connected with all of these cultures in India and the Far East and I think this portrait of him open and his wife which is in the exhibition sure has several things about it that really point to his role in the Dutch East India Company he was one of the directors of the vo sea and I think the feathers which is probably ostrich that covered the accessories that his wife wear were brought in as a realm it's out of trade with Africa you see a lot of ostrich feathers that begin to come in and they become a very fashionable important accessory so she's showing those off she also is showing off her jewelry diamonds and pearls were both came in in greater quantity due to trade with Asia at the time and I think you begin to see a lot more jewelry pearls in particular if you really look at the portrait said the paintings in the show it's kind of amazing how many pearls you begin to see and so I think she really is advertising his position as the director of the East India Company and the access he had to a lot of these real luxury goods that were coming through the trade and this portrait of Amalia van Soames who was married to the prince Henrik the pearls that she is wearing I think our actual pearls I began to doubt the validity of a lot of the pearls in the portraits after I began seeing so many but I'm pretty sure that she is wearing pearls she actually owned and actually there are records of prince henrik buying graduated pearl necklace for a price of but i think i figured was about 20,000 pounds which was a huge sum of money and this is drawing by one of the leading jewelers in amsterdam is of the graduated necklace that was that was bought for Amelia Amelia von Psalms so this is actual documentation of the fact that she owned the necklace and the teardrop earrings that you see here which were bought a bike Fletcher and at earlier date I think he paid a thousand pounds for the two pearls so freshwater pearls I think it's hard for some of us now that the cultured pearl industry is so pervasive but freshwater pearls were extraordinarily rare and freshwater pearls of this scale or even rarer so it's it's very hard to imagine that all of the pearls pearl drop earrings you see in these Dutch paintings were actually real and to get a strand of graduated pearls the size that she is wearing is also amazing so it accounts for the cost of the pearls that she is wearing and I think her lack of a lot of other jewelry also points to the fact that they want you to focus on the real thing that she has on I think this portrait is a little I don't know that it's actually again something that someone would have worn I think that the artist may be putting her in a more Rena style of dress the fabric is something that would have been popular in the 16th century this kind of very lavish velvet that you would find in Italy at the time so I don't think the dress is quite right but I think the pearls are right so go back to clinchers drawings of the pearls and then I just wanted to bring in Elizabeth Taylor and lepetit greena which is the pearl she is wearing it's one of these very large it's one of I think two of the largest pearls that are known and it it belonged to within Queen Mary for a while it belonged to the Spanish Court before it eventually made it back to Britain and then was bought by Richard Burton for her I think on a for a Valentine's Day present and I think he spent thirty seven thousand five hundred dollars for it at auction when her jewelry sold this necklace sold for like a hundred and two million dollars so yeah a really value but it gives you I think they're only two of these that we know of that have survived of these very large teardrop pearls so they were a real real important sign of wealth during this period and I think when you see them on Amalia von Psalms who was a member of the important aristocracy ruling family they make sense on her the smaller pearls that you see on guard Elizabeth do make some sense as well and especially the portrait as a symbol of wealth it makes sense to see this many pearls on her whether or not she actually owned them I don't you know that's up for debate she also wears a lot of diamonds the big kind of pectoral brooch that she is wearing on the rosette plus the studs that encircle the bodice and draped down those are all gold enameled gold set with diamonds and both diamonds and pearls as I said came in from the India trade I didn't mention the pearls were actually between India and I think it's Sri Lanka there were a lot of very important pearl beds and that's where a lot of the pearls were coming from the diamonds were also coming from India and they were also coming from Burma at this time and being shipped in to the lowland countries in the 16th century Antwerp was a very important Centre for the diamond trade but by the end of the century when Antwerp was besieged they the diamond trade really moved up to Amsterdam in the 17th century which i think is where it still rests today so most of the diamond trading went on there and so the diamonds are again a very important aspect of the Asian trade and something I think that that points to that wealth that was coming in through that trade and then I just want head - of course break-in the Vermeer and and looking at her pearl earrings you know once you know something about the history of pearls and the rarity of this kind of pearl it's pretty clear that she's probably not wearing real pearl earrings and there was a recent article that was published by get his name for you by Vincente like in a magazine called New Scientist and he was really looking at the painting of the Pearl the girl with the Pearl Earring and noticed that the reflections weren't quite right that the way the light reflected off the Pearl was not characteristic of a way a pearl would show that and I think the curators at the moritz house were also a little unsure about whether or not the Pearl was real and it turns out there was an industry of like faking pearls they were often made of glass or one interesting way I thought I found out that they were crushed fish scales could be formed into pearls and this is something someone in a lower class could have afforded and and could well be something that Vermeer used in his paintings there's also another rear mirror painting of a woman wearing probably this exact coat which is an indoor ensemble that one would wear to keep warm and it's it looks kind of it almost in the other painting it looks to me like it may be a Chinese silk but it's very hard to tell lined with ermine so the the idea of warmth in the home and this more informal dress is what you see in this garment and I think this garment is a kind of a nice segue into the next section of the talk that I want to focus on the clothing that was worn or that evolved out of the trade in a way because when the merchants began trading in the East particularly when the Dutch became began trading with Japan they're some of the leading merchants were often given diplomatic gifts which were these kind of versions of the kimono and you see such an example here on the right this is not really a traditional Japanese kimono it's more like a robe that they used kimono fabric both the linings for kimono are this orange fabric so everything about the fabrics our kimono fabrics but the fact that it's completely lined in this batting to give it warmth I think takes it out of a Japanese costume into something that was born in Holland and they become popular in Holland and they become known as a rock and you see that a lot of merchants wearing them on the left is the painting of the notary and he's wearing a version of this garment so again this kind of indoor clothing comfortable warm is a type of clothing that really begins to develop in or you see a lot more of in Europe in this period and I think maybe inspired by the introduction of this kimono shaped garment into Holland in the 17th century and I could probably the fabric out of which this is made is definitely Japanese and you can probably find kimono from the late 17th century into the 18th century made a very similar fabric so this garment I think continues on through the 17th century and I think by the end of the 18th century becomes a very common type of garment in the period and I love this painting of a family taking tea because again and of course tea was brought into the trade with the East so often tea drinking was done in one of the more private chambers of the house and it's often where a lot of the oriental goods that came in through trade like the tea tables the lacquered cabinets a lot of these were put in England in particular into these more private chambers and it's where you would entertain your closest friends maybe wearing these very loose-fitting garments called Larocque and they are I think really lead the way to fashion during the 18th century a kind of a transitional garment and I think really important in terms of the history of costume but maybe something we don't nobody has really studied it in in-depth the way they should because I think they had a serious impact on clothing in 18th century so along with the rope another think big influence on garments in 17th century Holland and on textiles in general in 17th century Holland is the cotton trade with India and I think this is something you really don't see in the portraits I looked really hard to find a painting where you could actually see Indian textile in the painting and finally found this piece in the museum in Munich and it shows a family with a young daughter and she is wearing a gown and probably a petticoat made out of Indian rhesus printed cotton and I I'm sorry the detail isn't that good but it's probably a cotton that is very similar to the larger textile that you see on the right during the 17th century these very dark ground printed Cotton's were the kinds of things that were being exported out of India and brought into Europe now the there was cotton was known in Europe during this period but it was not something that was that there wasn't a lot of access to it it also the Europeans weren't familiar with the Indian dyed Cotton's and what was special about them as the Indians had perfected techniques of using indigo and matter to die very fast brilliantly colored textiles these things they were very difficult to fade it was very hard they retained their color for a long time this was not true of printed textiles in Europe at the time because they were trying to print on linen which really doesn't take dye very well and so you get these very muddy brown printed linens that are not that attractive this material which you could easily wash kept it's color must have been a complete revolution to the Europeans and during the 17th century the trade in rhesus printed textiles just exploded and I wanted to talk a little bit about this because of the connections to the age and the new world exhibition where there are some printed textiles in that show there's some wonderful connections between the two shows and the cultures during this time but here on the left you can see her wearing that printed cotton and I think we don't really when we think of Dutch 17th century costume it's very hard to think of them wearing cloth like this because we so rarely see it in paintings but I think there was a lot of it that was worn and it had an important role in costume during this period and the textiles as well so I think from what I've been saying I think you can in get a sense that the paintings of the period they did provide a good link to our understanding of what was worn in Holland during the 17th century the kinds of garments that were worn the types of fabrics that people loved and the kind of aspirational jewelry trims notions the the high style you can really see in a lot of these paintings but the paintings - I think leave out part of the story such as the the pattern fabrics the silks that we looked at earlier and also these printed Cotton's that were coming through and we're extremely popular in in the Netherlands at this time and so I hope when you know you look at the paintings in the show kind of keep this in mind and I'll just close because I think this is true not only of the Dutch in Holland during this period but also a lot of painting especially portraits that were done in Europe and even in the US during the 18th century in particular the fashion for painting plain silks people in more classy sized dress not even accurate historical dress is something you see in a lot of portraits that were done and - I personally feel that the are impressions of what colonial Bostonians we're from the portraits of Copley and others is not not the case because if you look at the 18th century dresses that we know were born in Boston during the period and the menswear they were a lot of pattern silks and very brilliantly patterned silks so I think we need to kind of keep this in mind when we think about historic dress and using paintings as a source for them and thank you [Applause] so we certainly have time for some questions we ask that those of you who are leaving now please do so quietly so we can get on with the questions raise your hand and then we'll bring the microphone to you we'll go over there first hi I have two quick questions one is how long would they wear those ruffs between washings and also the red I was surprised to see like the maids and such bright red wasn't red expensive dyed red there was a lot of trade let's see uh well the ruffs I really can't tell you I think you know the the wealthy or the family probably the more often you could do wash and clean because you had the servants in order to do it or you could send them out so the interval between cleanings I I really don't know but the red dye coach Anil from South America is a very important dye that was part of this whole global trade very important you got those really rich red colors from that and there was also matter dye which was known in Europe at the time and lock dye which was coming from the east so there was a lot of red dye coming into Europe at the time you think of the red coats the British redcoats a lot of that red was very popular and very accessible because of the trade natural dyes can get really brilliant you can get beautiful color with natural dyes it surprises people thank you in the exhibit and through the lectures there appeared hairstyles were primarily pulled back under a cap and three styles of caps the plain white that the servants might be wearing what I would call a witch's cap the black black witch's cat mm-hmm and then it appears to be have an inverted V deep into the forehead mm-hmm and I'd almost looked for most of the women that a I had a eating hairline are they shaved or pulled here huh so that they're very high for it could you comment on that and doesn't pay meaning ya know I'm afraid I can't I'm not familiar enough with it that beautiful like the idea of beauty at the time I would if I wanted to research the caps I'd look at some of the regional styles of dress to see if that may be coming out of a specific region because I think in reading about the maids a lot of them came from different regions in in the Netherlands and and may have brought that with them but I don't know enough about the cap styles to really comment on that if you could kindly comment by class how many outfits dresses or outfits would a person of each class typically own I'd have to make that up know I don't know but the little work I've done on French 18th century dress someone of the poor class may have to chemises a bodice and a skirt and that's it a woman a man would have a suit and maybe two shirts and then you just kind of want kept on washing the shirts and the chemises to keep things clean you know of course as you went up the scale the wardrobes increased until like Madame de Pompadour wardrobe she a dress after dress after dress after dress so I think it just it varied according to spending and taste too so it's hard to say unless you did a really thorough survey of probate inventories I really enjoyed it thanks that a couple questions there's um can you go back to the slide of the syndics because I have a question about one thing that they're wearing that it looks like it's metal attached somebody's asked me about it and I don't know the answer so and this was also an opportunity to talk about the ruffs because somebody else noticed that there were two different kinds of ruffs and I was told that ask them yeah no you know no you haven't passed it yet no that's no it was a black velvet here yeah okay so the man at the far left what are those metal things hanging from his vigilance anklets what is egglets they were there's probably some kind of lacing going on whether the I can't tell from here if the doublet is laced to the the troncos I'm not sure exactly but they were usually put at the ends of laces so you could insert them into the holes more easily and lay something together and then somebody else noticed about this very portrait that three of the men are wearing the same kind of collar and the fourth is wearing a different the guy at the far right is wearing a different kind of collar and I was told that at a certain point it's not a question of chronology it's not a question of whether you're old and conservative versus young and hip but rather that men at the time it was like preferring a neck long tie to a bowtie the guy at the right like that they would have specific kinds of collars that they prefer portraits the group portraits I would say that's probably the case because even in the the militiamen you see a range as well fascinating they're the same you know it's the same age guys it's the same period of time and yet one guy preferred a different kind of there the one on the right that would have been much more difficult to maintain I would say he maybe as a higher status or somehow you know wherewithal and then back to the Vermeer woman writing I was told that's not her man at all it's rabbit and it's made to look like her man it could be I don't know how they know that we do know that jacket belong to Vermeer the woman is there an inventory with it in it yes there's an inventory with it I'm not sure it says rabbit but I was told that's definitely not a Herman but I don't care how you tell alright looks like it will go over in the center there you said that not many of the textiles from Netherlands in this period had survived was that generally true or was it well not many of the actual garments survived was that true generally in that historical period or was there some reason that they didn't survive in the Netherlands oh I think the garment garments tend to to get remade and reused a lot and I think you know as you go farther back in time less and less just you know so it's a general thing there's far less from the sixteenth century and you know on we have more from the 18th a lot more from the 19th you know it's just part of time takes its toll we have a lot of fragments of textiles some of which you know we're part of a garment because of their shape or seam lines so we can really you know say well this was probably a doublet or this was probably that we do have a lot of textiles we've got thousands of fragments in the collection thank you thank you very nice lecture thank you I just yes they did you would work right on top of the pattern which would have the broad outlines of the design and then you would work from that so someone was making the pattern yes yes mm-hmm I think there are a few that are extant not a lot but there are a lot of pattern books that start to be published at this time yes yes when you know from the 15th century on you start seeing embroidery pattern books lace pattern books a lot of that they started a lot in Italy and then into Holland thank you they were getting around huh I don't know how much they've washed them I mean part of the reasons for wearing the linen undergarments was to protect the outer garments you know it was they were very conscious of that I do know that they didn't know they didn't know about some kind of chemical cleaning like solvents that they could use to clean the garments they would also die things if you got a bad stain on it though and it was you know a white they diet a darker color to cover up the stain so that the dyers houses were very important in terms of you know taking care of stain garments the India cotton was very beautiful and they knew how to dye it and they knew how to use the natural dyes right and at some point I think England actually closed the India Indian factory yes and they wanted to sell their calico well this was wondering about when this came up yeah this some the trade between the Dutch and India and cotton was continued through the 17th into the 18th century the Cotton's became so popular at the end of the 17th century that both France and England forbade trade in Indian cotton and it didn't they didn't allow it to come back in again in France until I think 1759 by that time people had begun to figure out the process and started to produce the printed textiles in both England and France but yeah they were banned for quite a few years but there was so much smuggled a lot of it through the Netherlands that went into France and England hi can you comment on the van Gogh painting that at the MFA here the Weaver you know just relating the kinds of fabrics you've talked about in the work and the materials being used to Van Gogh's paintings in the 19th century yes like what was the Weaver and in the 19th century they would have been still they would have still been natural fibers they would have still well no he's later in the 19th century industrialization in the textile industry really happens during the 19th century and by the mid century you've got chemical dyes being introduced so it's it's a very very different picture in terms of what you're seeing in Van Gogh hi I have a question about lace did every household have a little lace maker oh I don't think so I think it was a big it was a big business it was a big industry in a way people you know women were lace makers there were merchants who were working with the women in their homes so okay it wasn't it wasn't like a schoolgirl art I think you may have learned it but they were not making lace for the family no I think it was more of a business there were a lot of women who were actually controlling the lace trades too which is interesting well thank you for speaking today and thank you all [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 11,822

Rating: 4.8873239 out of 5

Keywords: dutch art, european art, fashion, dress, fashion arts, art history, art, lecture, fine art

Id: xVKCBXzVz64

Length: 70min 10sec (4210 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2017