The Material Culture of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Dollhouses: Replication, Reproduction & Imitation

Abstract

A number of collector's cabinets known as pronk or luxury dollhouses were formed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by women in the Netherlands. The present study examines the dollhouse cabinets as exemplars of material culture collections assembled by female collectors. Primary sources give outsized attention to the materiality of these structures, often noting types of substance, quality, and craft. Despite what appears to be a straightforward transcription of the domestic world in miniature, the dollhouses are a multifaceted intersection of authentic materials as well as clever imitations or substitutions. The dollhouse collections are themselves predicated on the notion of reproduction as they replicate the home in small scale. Documents from the period provide a rich source from which to probe the meanings invested in the materiality of these dollhouses as sources of wonder. Economic theory from the period sheds new light on the dollhouses as forums for imitation and novelty, concepts that inform the innovative nature of these collections as it intertwined with issues of multiples and miniaturization.