Day 361 - Upstate New York Dutch home

 

June 17, 2024

The sign outside gallery 712 characterizes the space as a period room, but additional descriptive materials acknowledge that this isn't really so . The room, taken from a house in Albany County that was built in 1751, contains objects that might have been found in a Hudson Valley Dutch home of that era, but these are exhibited as in any gallery, not arranged to resemble the interior of a room.  The room is so dark it makes me wonder whether my vision is going - I have to read captions using the flashlight app on my cell phone -- and why the Met even bothers, since the gallery is so uninviting.

A narrow space adjacent to the main one focuses on construction methods, which were similar to those used iin the Netherlands. The description makes me more aware than ever that architecture as a field is replete with terms I don't know, among them  "anchor bents,""corbels," and "nogging,"  A feature of this space is the front door, which must be eight feet tall. The placard notes that the door is actually a double door: the top part could be opened to admit light and air, while the bottom remained closed to  keep children in and animals out. Curiously, two circular glass  are set into the door near its top.  It strikes me that these must have been purely decorative, since the glass panels are set so high they couldn't possibly have served as peepholes. 

A case displays a number of handsome silver objects - among them, bowls, tankards, a baptismal basin, and a "funeral spoon" bearing the name of the decedent - and I read that while the first silver was imported, by the 1680s, colonial silversmiths were producing pieces for domestic and religious use. The tankards are especially alluring - their curved handles make me think of woman whose hand is placed insouciantly on her hip. Much less appealing to me but quite interesting is a "kast," or chest,  measuring about five feet tall and five feet wide, made in the New York City area between 1690 and 1720.  The caption notes that chests, used to store linens, were often given as dowry gifts and were the most valuable pieces of furniture in a residence. (What happened to beds, I wonder?). This one is painted in grisaille, which I find quite ugly. But the principal images - the pomegranate and the quince that adorn the door panels - are, I learn, symbols of fertility and marriage, further reinforcing the idea that the chest may have been given as part of a dowry.

Finally, it's interesting to note that a tiled wall against which a stove has been placed is lined on either side by blue-and-white tiles that I can only imagine came from Delft - evidence that these colonialists of Dutch extraction were seeking to bring a bit of the Old Country into their new environments.