The “foreroom” contained a black nutwood chest with two black feet under it, worth £2 10s., and some pieces of linen, £24 12s.; a looking-glass with a black frame, £1 5s.; two curtains before the glass windows; the family coat of arms in a black frame, £5 4s.; and the following paintings: “A great picture being a banquet with a black list,” “one ditto something smaller,” “one ditto a bunch of grapes with a pomegranate,” “one with apricocks,” “a small countrey,” “a Break of Day,” “a small Winter,” “a Cobler” and “a portrait of my lord Speelman.”
The pictures in the chamber include “a great picture banquet, worth £3 5s.; one ditto, £2 10s.; one small ditto, £1 15s.; one Abraham and Hagar, £1 5s.; four small countreys, £4; two small ditto, £1 12s.; one flower pot, one small ditto, one country people frolick, one sea-strand, one portraiture, and a plucked cock torn, two small countreys, one flower pot small, without a list, one small print broken, and thirteen East India prints pasted upon paper.”
This room was well furnished. There were sixteen linen curtains before the glass windows, a large and valuable kas covered or veneered with French nutwood, standing on two ball feet, worth £13; a great looking-glass with a black frame, a white valance before the chimney, “six cloths which they put on the shelves of the kas, one ditto with lace, two small calico valances before the glass windows, one red chimney cloth (probably placed over the white valance), two red striped silk curtains and two valances of the same, two green silk curtains and two embroidered valances, three grey striped silk chair cushions, four pieces of tapestry to be thrown over chests, one bedstead with white calico hangings and luxuriously supplied with cushions, and eight East India spreads, besides other spreads of flowered calico, red calico, and white calico in squares. There were five small East India boxes and a great deal of linen, also one white box marked E. W.”
Plate XXXVI.—The Oyster Feast, by Jan Steen. The Hague.
Figs. 35–36: Chairs (Seventeenth Century); Fig. 37: Marquetry Designs (Seventeenth Century).
Wherever the Dutch went, they lived not only in comfort, but in all the elegance and even splendour that their means would allow. In the New or the Old World, the merchant princes surrounded themselves with sumptuous furniture of mahogany, ebony, marquetry, ivory, lacquer, teak and sandal-wood, as well as porcelain, embroideries, rugs, screens and all kinds of stamped metal and bric-à-brac.
In 1685, the Count de Forbin says that the General of the East India Company at Batavia has a court quite royal in numbers and brilliance. “On my arrival (at the palace), the usual guard,” he writes, “which is very numerous, stood at arms, and, between two ranks of men, I was introduced into a gallery adorned with the most beautiful Japanese porcelains.”
Evelyn and other travellers are enthusiastic in their admiration of the riches and luxury they witnessed in Holland, although, as we have seen, England was not unfamiliar with Oriental art products. The Stuarts were art connoisseurs of the first rank, and James II, to whom Macaulay denies mental and aesthetic appreciation, was an intelligent collector. The most brilliant figure in the Court of Louis XIV, the Marquis de Dangeau, notes in his Diary (January 8, 1689), on the arrival of the fugitive Stuart: “The King of England found the apartments (of the Dauphin) admirable, and talked like a connoisseur of all the pictures, porcelains, crystals and other things that he saw there.”
One of the travellers who describes the Eastern goods seen in the shops and houses of Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, Charles Patin, writes in 1690:
“I had a sight of all their curiosities and those of all sorts, and among other divers paintings that we know, and others which are unknown to us; as also Indian and Chinese pieces of an inestimable value. In these last a curious eye may discover all the secret particulars of the history, the manner of living, customs and religion of those countries, and there are represented certain martyrs, who sacrifice their blood to the transport of their zeal, if it may be allowed to make so bad an application of that sacred name, which belongs only to the heroes of the true religion.”