"The Vertues Which Ought to be a Compleate Woman": Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

This study seeks to uncover the contemporary attitudes toward women and domesticity that are mirrored in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century. Various sources are employed in this endeavor, among them, prints with captions, emblems, and above all, literature that was originally intended for families. Family literature offers a valuable tool for understanding contemporary depictions of domesticity because like art, it too presents exemplary images of women as well-trained maidens, as housewives skilled in the administration of household affairs, as attentive mothers, and as pious and humble widows. Furthermore, both art and literature share specific metaphors alluding to a host of feminine virtues. Since specific virtues and tasks were exacted of women at every stage of their lives, the life phase or approximate age of the female depicted in a work of art was pivotal for the contemporary interpretation of its subject matter as a whole. The paintings examined here are therefore grouped according to the approximate ages or life stages of the women that are depicted: maidens, housewives, mothers, and widows. In fact, this arrangement deliberately imitates the chapter divisions and titles of Jacob Cats's influential book about women and the family: Houwelyck (1625). Despite their distinct connections with literature, domestic themes in art are neither painted versions of literary ideals nor painted transcriptions of reality. These works are much more sophisticated in that they represent a plausible reality, pictorially evoked for the interdependent purposes of artistic verisimilitude and meaning. Although they delighted the contemporary viewer with their ostensibly faithful rendition of the surrounding world, representations of women discharging assorted domestic tasks would have been seen to conform to universally acknowledged ideals concerning womanhood and the virtues most befitting it.