Introduction

The modern study of Dutch society in the seventeenth century is very largely inspired by paintings, and the paintings of that era betray a fascination with the material world. The moral messages that the Dutch masters wished to convey form a topic of continuing debate among art historians; but the material context in which those messages were placed remains as an astonishing fact, a fact so fascinating that, for many, it is the chief message of Dutch art. This people “firmly convinced in the substantiality of things” (J. Huizinga) raised up a material culture that constituted a work of art in its own right.

Dutch culture was by no means unique in the attention that it paid to the material dimensions of life, but in other European societies, the focus of attention rarely strayed far from courts and aristocratic life and, hence, from a material culture in which the practical and useful had no respectable place. In the Netherlands the visual arts focused on social classes below the very top and exhibited an unembarrassed concern with everyday objects.

This visual evidence inevitably piques our interest in the material circumstances of ordinary people in Dutch society. How broadly diffused was the comfortable simplicity of middle-class life? Did ordinary working people participate, to some degree, in the economic growth of the seventeenth century, or did their lives, as with those of other ordinary Europeans, continue to be perched at the margins of subsistence, exposed to the full force of the scourges of harvest failure, war, and disease? The answer to this question can aid in the appreciation of Dutch visual culture, but it also goes to the heart of any interpretation of Dutch economic development.