ABSTRACT
Certain ideas seem to crystallise with particular and lasting intensity in certain countries.1 As far as the idea of home is concerned, the home of the home is the Netherlands. This idea’s crystallisation might be dated to the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch Netherlands amassed an unprecedented and unrivalled accumulation of capital, and emptied their purses into domestic space. Simon Schama, whose thesis on the psychology of the Dutch Golden Age I borrow to introduce this chapter, quotes a contemporary: ‘in Amsterdam, and in some of the great cities of that small province…the generality of those that build there, lay out a greater proportion of their estates on the houses they dwell in than any people upon the earth’.2
