Overdoor with Two Reclining Women with Garlands

Between the 1740s and the 1780s, taste in Amsterdam interiors turned from the curling ornament of the Rococo to calmer forms borrowed from ancient Rome. This overdoor, painted by Jurriaan Andriessen around 1786, belongs to the later moment. It was cut to fit around the top of a door frame, and two women in classical drapery recline along the sloping edges of the cut-out.

One wears a wreath of vine leaves and grapes and holds a leafy spray, the other trails a garland of flowers, and a festoon of fruit hangs between them. The Rijksmuseum shows it in a canal-house room decorated in the 1740s, to which, the museum notes, it was added later. Like the room, it belongs to the Amsterdam Museum.