The Dollhouse of Petronella Oortman

Between 1686 and 1710 Petronella Oortman, the wife of an Amsterdam silk merchant, furnished a cabinet dolls' house with miniatures made by real craftsmen, and around 1710 Jacob Appel painted it with its doors open, room by room. The Rijksmuseum puts the reason in one line, the dolls' house was so expensive that a painting was made of it. The Frankfurt collector Zacharias von Uffenbach recorded that it was valued at 20,000 to 30,000 guilders. The picture has since become the record of what the house once held. Almost all of its original dolls are lost, and only a baby in a cradle survives. In Appel's painting the rooms are still inhabited, and in the left-hand room of the middle floor stands a Black servant.