A notable room is that taken from the house of Constantia Huygens in The Hague, built by Jacob van Kampen. Blue silk is curiously used to embellish the panelling. The ceiling, painted by Gérard de Lairesse (1640–1711) represents Apollo and Aurora. This room is in the Louis XIV style. A later fashion is, however, shown in the splendid “Chinese Boudoir” of the latter part of the seventeenth century from the Stadtholder’s palace at Leeuwarden.
Another room deserving attention is from a small hunting-lodge called the Hoogerhuis, near Amersfoort, built about 1630 by Jacob van Kampen and inhabited by him. The room is lighted by eight small windows, over which paintings were hung. There is an interesting bedstead here, ornamented with painted garlands, and with three compartments, beneath the centred one of which is the Spanish motto, “_’El todo es nada_” (Everything is nought).
The Dutch of the seventeenth century passed practically all their lives at home. With the exception of merchants, students and men of affairs, people rarely visited their friends and relatives in neighbouring towns. As Pieter van Godewijck wrote:—
_Het reysen is een taeck nyet yder opgelegt, En ’t is nyet al te veel en sonder blaêm gezegt, Het huys is als een graf, waerin wy altyt wonen, In ’t aerdsche tranendal._
(Travelling is a task not given to everybody, And it’s not said so much and without blame That the home is like a grave, wherein we always dwell, In the earthly vale of tears.)
The house was therefore “their world, their toy, their god”; they loved to embellish and decorate it, they loved to take care of it and keep it clean, they loved to see it painted on panel and canvas; and some of them even went so far as to have their house reproduced in miniature, with all its furniture and belongings copied in wood and metal.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the so-called dolls’ houses, which may be studied in the museums of Amsterdam, Utrecht, and other towns, were merely the somewhat elaborate toys with which the English-speaking juvenile race sometimes amuse themselves. As the old inventories show, dolls’ houses and all their appurtenances were very vivid mirrors of contemporary life, including furniture and costume. This is particularly true of Holland, although other countries of Western Europe preserved evidences of the taste for similar “toys” of earlier date. Henry IV of France, for instance, when a child, played with toys, among which are noticeable a suit of clothes in wrought silver.