Foregrounding the Background: Images of Dutch and Flemish Household Servants

Abstract

To a great extent, art historians who study early modern women have focused on what Patricia Skinner has termed “the great and the good”: aristocratic women, wives of wealthy merchants, and female artists, saints, and nuns.1 Not only do publications privilege these groups, but so do titles of paintings that were invented in the modern era. Such titles as Lady at her Toilette, Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace, or Man Visiting a Woman Washing her Hands disregard the presence of the working-class women in the compositions (Figs. 7.1–7.2).2 This essay instead explores a group that art historians have largely ignored: ordinary female household servants. Although several historians have focused on seventeenth-century Dutch servants, few art historians have discussed them, and, other than Bert Watteeuw’s recent essay on Rubens’ domestic staff, household workers from the Southern Netherlands or from earlier centuries have been largely overlooked.3 The reasons for this are numerous. Few documents