Delftware is among the greatest Dutch achievements of the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the last hundred and fifty years a great many private individuals and museums, in the Netherlands and beyond, have amassed collections of Delftware.
It is almost self-evident that the most important collection of this ‘national product‘ should be in the Netherlands, particularly in the Rijksmuseum, The Municipal Museum in The Hague and in many other places.
Bekijk de collectie
Around 1850 the interest in Delftware effectively vanished in The Netherlands. However, one of the first exhibitions displaying Delftware in 1863 attracted a great deal of attention. The exhibition coupled with a growing interest in the past, opened the eyes of a new group of buyers. Since then Delftware has been widely collected and the subject of extensive research.
This Delft diaper basket was made in the 17th century. We see an Old Dutch interior with a woven wicker cradle in the middle. The mother has just changed the child, while the father is lighting a pipe. A similar scene is depicted on a smaller-sized basket attributed to the ‘Moriaenshooft’ pottery by the Hoppesteijn family.
A diaper basket was usually made of woven willow branches, wicker or wood. In very wealthy families, one could find a silver diaper basket, also known as clothes (ben = basket), which was displayed as a status symbol in the delivery room. Herein lay the most precious items of clothing worn during the christening,
The shape of the diaper basket has many similarities with a wooden mangle tray from the same period, while the half-round twisted ornaments on the edge are directly derived from the woven wicker diaper baskets from Halle in Brabant. We find this in a small format in the inventory of the doll houses. The grotesques portrayed on the vertical side of the basket might have derived from wooden carvings or from silverware produced in the second half of the seventeenth century.
The Republic of the United Provinces, as the Netherlands was officially known in the 17th centry, was unquestionably a phenomenon amidst all the monarchies in Europe. Not only because it was a state without a king, but also because in the second half of the seventeenth century the Netherlands was an economic and political force to be reckoned with. A small country but a major power.
Thanks to the amassed wealth and economic advantage which the Netherlands had over the other countries of Europe, the average per capita income was to remain the highest in Europe for a very long time to come. The difference between rich and poor was also much smaller in the Netherlands than it was elsewhere. In consequence there was a very large well off middle-class that could afford all sorts of luxuries, a unique phenomenon in Europe.
