Historical scenes of laundry

This story map is an interactive visualisation of the the research work by Marie Keulen. This research had a focus on one specific type of domestic work portrayed in several 18th-century cityscapes: the activities of washing, drying, and bleaching laundry as depicted in the works within the 2017 exhibition catalogue Kijk Amsterdam.

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.

Please see Marie Keulen’s blogpost for more information on the research.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Story map by Gamze Saygi, data entry and research by Marie Keulen and the data is pulled from the FOSGUS database designed by Ivan Kisjes and Leon van Wissen from CREATE Amsterdam.