Laundry in the streetscapes of 18th century Amsterdam
/In this blogpost, Marie Keulen, who was a student enrolled at the Honours programme, looks at several cityscapes in the catalogue Kijk Amsterdam of 18th century Amsterdam with a focus on one specific type of domestic work portrayed in several 18th-century cityscapes: the activities of washing, drying, and bleaching laundry.
Investigating the everyday street life of early modern Amsterdam, visual source material could not be overlooked as they contain incredibly detailed information. Moreover, in the second half of the 18th century, a whole new genre of painting the urban space had evolved in the Dutch Republic: the cityscape. Unlike the traditional manner of drawing the urban space as a background component of a painting representing a historical event, the cityscape itself was the dominant subject matter.[1] Although the roots of this genre were already visible in the 16th and 17th centuries, during its heyday in the second of the 18th century ‘the cityscape’ was a full-grown artistic genre with its own rules for perspective and composition. Painting the city environment as detailed and truthful as possible, was part of the genre conventions. Artists sometimes worked on a canvas or a panel, but most of the time, they worked with pen and pencil on paper, which enabled them to work at their drawing locations.
In his essay on the cityscape as an art genre Boudewijk Bakker discusses three striking characteristics of the Amsterdam cityscapes that point towards a coherent “well-defined model of the cityscape” as a genre.[2] In most cases, the main topic of a cityscape is a specific building, church, gate, street, canal, garden, or park. Bakker notes that not only well-known or wealthy parts of the city are depicted but that the less-known and insignificant parts are portrayed as well. Another characteristic of the Amsterdam cityscape is the fact that most of the images are populated “with a great variety of representatives of the urban population: young and old, rich and poor.”[3] Lastly, the city of Amsterdam is shown at its best, meaning that all buildings and streets are in perfect condition, everything looks clean, and the weather is always nice. In an earlier blog post, Bob Pierik already introduced this genre of 18th-century cityscapes of Amsterdam through discussing the 2017 exhibition Kijk Amsterdam of the Amsterdam City Archives. Along with this exhibition, the catalogue Kijk Amsterdam was published, in which 229 cityscapes of Amsterdam were collected and categorized. This catalogue provided extensive material to investigate the depiction of domestic work on the streets of 18th century Amsterdam.
Within the historiography of gender and urban space, a division has been made between the public sphere of the street and the private sphere of the home.[4] According to this narrative, domestic work should be seen as an activity of the last category. However, several cityscapes in the catalogue Kijk Amsterdam of 18th century Amsterdam seem to show a different story, raising such questions as: Is domestic work, usually categorized within the private sphere of the home, happening in the public sphere of the streets of 18th century Amsterdam, and if so, what exactly is happening and who is involved? This blog post will focus on one specific type of domestic work portrayed in several 18th-century cityscapes: the activities of washing, drying, and bleaching laundry.
Of the 229 cityscapes collected in Kijk Amsterdam, seven pictures depict activities involving laundry. In examining the laundry in the streets of 18th century Amsterdam, this study follows the project’s central methodology, where the map-based database plays a central role. Sources with depiction or description of certain historical scenes should be selected and categorized in the project database in the following manner: the historical scenes can be divided into one or several snapshots, each of which contains information about events, persons, and locations. The data in the database should all be properly connected: This means that every source is given a specific Source ID (S), which is connected to one or more snapshots with a specific Annotation ID (A), which is then linked to an event with an Event ID (E), which is further tied to a person with a Person ID (P), and a location with a Location ID (L). This makes the following data entry ‘formula’: S ID – A ID – E ID – P ID; L ID. Every source needs to be examined and analysed regarding all those four different aspects: the scene(s), the event(s), the person(s), and the location(s).
In the case of visual sources, the selected image itself constitutes the scene in which one or several events take place. From the above mentioned seven images with laundry related activities, several sets of data around this type of event or activity could be structured. This approach was suitable for the source material: whereas many cityscapes portray the same event, this is less the case regarding the depicted locations or persons. Below follows an example of one of the images as structured in the database.
Figure 1. Jurriaan Andriessen, Gesicht in de Plantagie, ca. 1785 - ca. 1790, pencil in grey and colour, 234 x 330 mm., Amsterdam City Archives, 10097: Collectie Stadsarchief Amsterdam: tekeningen en prenten, 010097010710.
The image is a drawing by Jurriaan Andriessen from the late 1780s, depicting the Nieuwe Prinsengracht in the Plantage (nowadays Artis) [Fig.1]. Two groups of two women are bleaching white linen on the grass next to the Nieuwe Prinsengracht, and both groups are part of two different snapshots happening in the same historical scene. All information related to the event, location, and persons connected to the snapshots is stored in the database. The location information is marked on a historical map, as can be seen on the example below, which constitutes the location data of the two women depicted in the front of Andriessen's drawing [Fig. 2].
Figure 2. Example of a location ID marked on a historical map.
The seven drawings depicting laundry in the streets of 18th century Amsterdam do not tell us something on specific women drying, washing, or bleaching laundry on a specific time and date; we do not know whether the artists based their drawings on one specific observation, and if so, when exactly this took place. Yet, what those images do tell us is that around the period the cityscapes were created, there were women engaging in those activities at those places. Looking back at the question of whether domestic work was happening in the public sphere of the streets of 18th century Amsterdam, this can be answered positively. Drying, washing, and bleaching laundry did take place in several public places in Amsterdam.
It is noteworthy that, although the selection was made without any precondition on the gender of the depicted figures, all persons participating in the images’ events are women. Looking at the data from the seven images, there are three distinct groups of images: one image depicts a woman drying laundry on the railing of a bridge of the Herengracht (1 image, 1 event, 1 woman), two images depict women washing laundry in a canal (2 images, 2 events, 3 women), and the other four images depict several groups of women involved in bleaching laundry on the grass on several locations – some by spreading out white textile on the grass and/or waiting in the grass for the textile to be dry, others by carrying baskets of laundry before or after bleaching it on the grass (4 images, 8 events, 21 women). In total, 25 people are depicted in the images, of which all are women. Several activities are thus involved in ‘doing the laundry’ in 18th century Amsterdam, and several women are doing the same activity in the same place. By far the most women were involved in ‘laundry activities’ relating to bleaching laundry on the grass.
Figure 3. One of the images depicting groups of women involved in bleaching laundry. Reinier Vinkeles, De Haarlemmerpoort met het Haarlemmerplein, 1766, pencil in grey and colour, 173 x 206 mm., Amsterdam City Archives, 10001: Collectie Atlas Splitgerber. Stadsarchief Amsterdam, 010001000228.
The division between the 21 women bleaching laundry and the 4 women drying and washing laundry is not only a division based on the event but also on the location. All events of bleaching laundry on the grass are taking place in relatively quiet, green areas at the outskirts of Amsterdam: at the Plantage, the border of the Plantage, the area around the Utrechtsepoort, and the area around the Haarlemmerpoort. The locations of the events of ‘drying laundry on a canal bridge’ and ‘washing laundry in a canal’, on the other hand, are situated in the city centre within the canal belt of Amsterdam. This suggests that there were several ‘hot-spots’ of bleaching laundry at relatively quiet, green areas at the outskirts of Amsterdam. It was at those place that the majority of the women involved in laundry activities were depicted [Fig. 3]. It also suggests that several women in 18th century Amsterdam would have to carry their laundry over quite some distance to those green hot-spots. Even more so as the activities of washing, drying, and bleaching laundry do seem to be in the same locations. This, together with the fact that bleaching laundry took plenty of time, makes laundry work a very time-consuming activity.
A look at how Amsterdammers used to do laundry in the 1700s (Video creation by Gamze Saygi, see the interactive story map in this link.).
The observations on the groups of women bleaching laundry in the outskirts of Amsterdam raises a couple of questions. One of them is connected to the women involved in those types of events: who were those women and what was their position? Although it is clear that the women are involved in domestic work, it remains an open question whether this was private or paid work. The existence of several ‘hot-spots’ with groups of women suggests the latter. Moreover, the identical white linen apron as part of their clothing may refer to the women being servants. If this was the case, another interesting question would be whether the groups of women working in the same location were in some way related to each other or whether they were interacting with each other. Doing the same time-consuming work at the same location must have created some sort of mutual understanding or connection. Maybe these laundry ‘hot-spots’ functioned as social spaces in which women could communicate with each other.
The discussed drawings depicting laundry in the streets of 18th century Amsterdam are a good example of how visual source material can provide insights and raise new questions on early modern everyday street life.
