Ideals of Femininity in the Dutch Republic: Analyzing Systems of Class, Gender and Power in Caspar Netscher's 'Lacemaker' (1662)

In the Lacemaker, Netscher emphasized the importance of the figure’s activity by centralizing her naaikussen, the pillow on which she makes lace. The figure’s gaze is focused fully on her lacemaking, with her body angled away from the viewer and the picture plane. With these details, the artist draws the eye to the figure’s lacemaking, an activity that was gendered feminine, while obscuring her class status through contradictory sartorial choices as examined in the previous section. It raises questions of how lacemaking related to class status in the Dutch Republic. 

Alongside sewing and needlework, lacemaking was a practice taught exclusively to women. Education was highly valued in the Low Countries, although a child’s instruction depended on their gender: boys were more likely to learn arithmetic and a trade, while girls were taught domestic skills. According to Patricia Wardle, needlework, sewing, and lacemaking were among the skills taught to girls.[27] In orphanages and schools, these activities were taught as both a domestic necessity and as a trade, a specifically female means of income.[28] These tasks doubly taught girls an activity that was productive and aligned with propriety, as visualized in the woodcut for the cover page of Nûw Modelbuch, Allerley Gattungen Däntelschnür (New Pattern Book (1561) of All Kinds of Bobbin Laces), an instructional pattern book for bobbin lacemaking, published in Zurich in 1560 (Figure 17). In the woodcut, two women make lace on naaikussen situated on their lap or a stand, with their attention focused on their lacemaking. They sit before two large windows within a plain domestic interior, a stone fireplace behind the figure on the left while a dog sleeps on the floor in the foreground. The woodcut’s use as the cover for an instructional manual could suggest that the image is equally educational in nature. Even if this woodcut was not specifically intended to be morally didactic, the scene reinforces the ideal of feminine industry and propriety as situated within and related to domestic life.

The adornment of Dutch homes with lace further gendered both the production of lace and the product itself, for the home was considered feminine and the “natural” location for women prescribed by moralists like Jacob Cats.[29] While Cats aimed his domestic treatise primarily at middle-class housewives, activities like lacemaking had different connotations and uses based on the woman’s class background. For upper class ladies, lacemaking was a pastime that was associated with domestic virtue, modesty, and industry. Middle-class women made lace to decorate their home, bed linens or clothing, reflecting positively on their ability to maintain their home. For lower-class women, needlework and lacemaking could be an important means of income.[30] While upper- and middle-class ladies were likely able to make lace, the amount required to fill a large household might have exceeded her capabilities, at least without help such as employing a local woman to provide these services. Hiring a woman to make lace allowed the housewife to maintain appearances within her home, and a working-class woman made some sort of income.[31] As a result, these skills could be relied upon if a working-class family fell on hard times. Commodifying a woman’s lacemaking skills also placed less stress on family resources, even allowing her to save for her own dowry. In this way, lace and lacemaking intertwined with domesticity, filling the physical home and exemplifying a woman’s moral rectitude and industrious nature.

Images of everyday domestic life such as the Lacemaker (Figure 18) carry an undertone of morality, constructing and reinforcing the ideal vision of feminine virtue and domesticity. Scholars have written extensively about the use of Dutch genre paintings as a vehicle for moral expression and education. Historian Jeroen Dekker analyzed how genre paintings used aesthetics of beauty for moral instruction; his study particularly focused on those works that taught parents how to raise their children.[32] Art historian Eddy de Jongh similarly suggested that moral teachings were cached within the beautiful vision of a constructed reality as portrayed in genre paintings.[33] Furthermore, Martha Moffitt Peacock rightly noted that these works constructed perceptions of feminine virtue, morality, and domesticity as ordained by men, thus reinforcing the patriarchal organization of Dutch society.[34] However, scholars typically focused on examples of explicit and clear didacticism, in contrast to the ambiguity and juxtapositions within works like Netscher’s Lacemaker. It raises questions about the moralizing potential of this work, whether it was intended by Netscher or not. Further, it queries if it could be successfully didactic when Netscher obscured any moral messaging through ambiguity.

Netscher’s Lacemaker and the figure's apparent class status stand in contrast to other depictions of women making lace by the artist's contemporaries. For example, Nicolaes Maes’s Lacemaker of 1655 (Figure 19) sits at an intricately-carved wooden table, her naaikussen on top beside a stack of books. A scroll with a portrait of a man hangs behind her to the left, a shelf situated on the right with keys and a pouch hanging underneath it. Above her appears to be a window with a red curtain. These details create a more intimate, domestic space, while the books, the keys, and the table at which she sits give the room a commercial air, as suggested by Albert Blankert and Louis P. Grijp.[35] Most likely, the artist intended that the room connected to the home, as professionals like tailors and cobblers used the front room of the home for their businesses in the Dutch Republic.[36] Therefore, the woman occupies a space between the public and private sphere, between the domestic and the commercial. It also suggests that the woman portrayed is working-class, helping to operate a storefront for her father or husband, or perhaps she is a servant hired to help attract customers.[37] Maes drew the eye to the figure using tenebrism to create an apparent spotlight out of shadows around the lacemaking woman. The artist centralized the woman’s labor and her contribution to the business, her lacemaking revealing her industriousness and modesty. 

By contrast, Johannes Vermeer’s Lacemaker of 1669-70 (Figure 20) depicted an upper-class lady in the privacy of her home. This work presents an intimate view of a young woman making lace, dressed in a yellow blouse or dress and a white undershirt or collar with her hair carefully coiffed. The left foreground shows a table covered with a luxurious carpet and a blue-patterned pillow with yellow and red threads dangling from it. In the middle ground, the woman works with a set of bobbins at an intricate contraption designed for lacemaking. The woman is situated close to the picture plane, the framing suggesting that the viewer sits beside the woman as she makes lace. Like Maes, Vermeer’s attention to detail classifies the woman’s socioeconomic status: the lacemaking table at which she works, her meticulously-braided coiffure, and her yellow silk bodice signal wealth. Blankert and Grijp categorized this woman as a juffertje, a young woman of the upper-class for whom skills like lacemaking were part of her training as an elegant lady.[38] Vermeer’s composition draws the viewer’s attention to the woman and the lace she makes, relaying her ladylike education and the productive pastime in which she engages. Vermeer’s Lacemaker exemplifies an upper-class lady making lace, while Maes’s painting demonstrates that working-class women made lace and were portrayed doing this activity.

In contrast to his contemporaries, Netscher places a maidservant exhibiting moral rectitude at the center of his painting, arousing sympathy for a figure typically maligned, as explored in the previous section. All three artists centralize the depicted women, celebrating their industry and propriety. The close proximity of the figure to the picture plane in Vermeer’s painting draws the viewer’s eye to the seated woman and her focus as she makes lace. While Maes does not make his figure the exact center of his painting, she remains the focal point of the scene, much like Netscher’s Lacemaker. Netscher places his figure in a well-lit but sparsely furnished room of unknown location within a presumed domestic space. Details such as the mussel shells and straw on the floor and the creased print nailed to the wall are minutely rendered, though their inclusion in Netscher’s composition refuses straightforward interpretation. In contrast, Maes and Vermeer utilize the details of their figures’ appearances and surroundings to further emphasize the class status of the woman portrayed, whether middle- or upper-class respectively. The identity of the women is clarified through their surroundings, in contrast to Netscher’s use of contradictory details in his composition. Rather than maintain previous models of lacemaking women, perhaps Netscher aimed to create something new, in both who is portrayed (a maidservant) and to what effect (a model of industry and virtue rather than scorn or mockery).

Footnotes:

[27]  James M. Andersen, Daily Life During the Reformation (Oxford: Greenwood, imprint of ABC-CLIO, 2011), 109. Even as genre paintings highlighted women’s presence and domestic toil, Helga Möbius added that the perception of women’s place in the home as “natural,” supported in contemporary writing on theology, philosophy, and nature, was reinforced by an education system that only taught girls skills related to the domestic sphere. Möbius rightly articulated that this created a cycle that increasingly excluded women from public life. Helga Möbius, Woman of the Baroque Age, trans. by Barbara Chrusick Beedham (Montclair, NJ: Abner Schram Ltd., 1982), 31-32.

[28]  Patricia Wardle, “Needle and Bobbin Lace in Seventeenth Century Holland,” The Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club 66:1/2 (1983): 3-7. Maarten Prak added that girls in orphanages were not allowed to work outside the institution; within the orphanage, they learned skills that would be useful for managing a household. Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century, 38. For sources relating sewing, spinning and lacemaking together with moral virtue, see Van Schulten, “Genre - Picturing Everyday Life,” 55, and Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22-25.

[29] Jonathan Janson with Adelheid Rech, “Lace Making in the Time of Vermeer,” Essential Vermeer: http://www.essentialvermeer.com/lace/lace.html.

[30] Both lacemaking and sewing tasks were in constant demand in middle- and upper-class households. For example, English travelers described Dutch houses as filled with lace: lace adorned garments, decorated linens, and muffled the noise of cookware or a closing door where a baby slept. See Janson with Rech, "Lace Making in the Time of Vermeer." R.M.’s 1561 instructional book on bobbin lacemaking supports this development, stating how as more women learned to make lace, lace was used in more diverse ways. This would also increase the demand for lace. R.M. also noted that bobbin lacemakers were better paid than other seamstresses, probably due to the increased difficulty and possible intricacy of bobbin lace designs developing in Northern Europe from the 1560s onwards. See R.M., Nüw Modelbuch von allerley gattungen Däntelschnür (New Pattern Book (1561) of All Kinds of Bobbin Laces), trans. Helen Hough with Brad Gelliford (Original published Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1561. Translation published Arlington, TX: James G. Collins & Associates, 2018), 5-6.

[31] Janson with Rech, "Lace Making in the Time of Vermeer."

[32] Jeroen J.H. Dekker, “Beauty and Simplicity: The Power of Fine Art in Moral Teaching on Education in Seventeenth-Century Holland,” Journal of Family History 34:2 (April 2009): 166.

[33] R. Raben, and R. Vermeij, 'Worteloof en Cultuurhistorie. Kinstopvattingen van Peter Hecht en Eddy de Jongh" Leidschrift 6:3 (1990): 51, referenced by Michael North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, trans. Catherine Hill (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 7-8.

[34] Peacock, Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, 18.

[35] Albert Blankert and Louis P. Grijp, “An Adjustable Leg and Book: Lacemakers by Vermeer and Others, and Bredero’s Groot Lied-boeck in One by Dou,” in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive Presented on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. Cynthia P. Schneider, William W. Robinson, and Alice I. Davies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), 41.

[36] Andersen, Daily Life During the Reformation, 111.

[37] Marieke de Winkel discusses how a pretty young woman at the front of the house could help attract business, exploring this quality’s use for both “proper” establishments like shops, tailors, and cobblers as well as by sex workers to lure in male clients. De Winkel, "Ambition and Apparel," 70.

[38] Blankert and Grijp, "An Adjustable Leg and Book," 40.