9     Doll’s Houses

 

 

 

T

here is no record as to who built the earliest doll’s house, but there is an inventory of one that was made in Nuremberg for Albrecht V of Bavaria in 1558. It was originally intended for his daughter but when it arrived he decided that it was far too nice a toy for her and put the house in his own art collection. The doll’s house would almost certainly have contained toys made of silver.

It was roughly 50 years later that doll’s houses of German design started taking shape. Christopher Weigel is known to have written in 1698.

 

The materials of which these dolls and playthings are made are in part silver and are fashioned by gold and silversmiths. […] Indeed, there is scarce a trade in which that which usually is made big may not often be seen copied on a small scale as a toy for playing with. (Poliakoff, 1980, p. 7)

 

The desire of adults to buy doll’s houses started in Germany, spread to Holland and fifty years later became established as an English hobby, primarily for adults, or so it is assumed.

In England, during the eighteenth century, the doll was already established as a child’s baby, so that when doll’s houses appeared in England they were called baby houses. There are many superb examples of doll, or baby, houses in the museums of the United Kingdom. There is a fine collection of baby houses or doll’s houses at Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, London. In fact the Westbrook baby house which was once in the Victoria & Albert Museum has now been moved to the Bethnal Green Museum.

The wealthy Englishmen returning home from the continent brought with them the Dutch ideas of having portioned cabinets standing on legs, out of range of sticky-fingered children, where the adults could view and keep their treasured possessions. These cabinets were similar to the Dutch doll’s house, except their doll’s houses had two doors on them that when shut made them appear to be ordinary wooden cabinets. When the doors were opened all was revealed, a dazzling display of decorated and furnished rooms in the Dutch style. Those owned by the wealthy folk were furnished with gold and silver household fittings, while the lesser well off had to be content with brass and pewter.

In England, the tall secure cupboard for hiding adults’ treasures eventually had to give way to ‘squatters’, as children’s tiny dolls moved in. It was only a matter of time before the English doll’s house as we now know it came into being with its elaborate front of house decoration and opening out to display equally tastefully decorated interiors. These early doll’s house were usually locked, as many contained expensive silver furniture fittings, kitchen implements and utensils. Around 1700 the English decided it would be nice to have their baby houses with a full frontal view like an ordinary house with doors and windows, and so the modification began to what we recognise today as a doll’s house.

In the Geffrye Museum in London, there is a surviving doll’s house of the early proto type Dutch design, owned once by John Evelyn (see below, Figure 5, p. 62). These houses were exact replicas of actual houses of that period.

There was no limit to the extremes the owners would go to make their particular doll’s house as authentic as possible. The doll’s house of Petronella Oortman, built c. 1690 and now housed in the Rijksmuseum, even has silver displayed in her doll’s house cupboards, exactly as a bride would have her dowry. The money spent on furnishing these houses more than suggests that these doll’s houses were used extensively for amusement by adults.

              Figure 4     An early Dutch doll’s house, c. 1800. Courtesy of Bethnal Green Museum.


Figure 5     John Evelyn’s doll’s house in Geffrye Museum, London.



The purpose of the original doll’s houses was educational, particularly in the kitchen. In 1631, Anne Koferlin not only had a doll’s house built but fitted it out as a training module. She published an explanatory leaflet teaching the future housewives the value of the kitchen components and how they were to be used.

It seems the attraction began to build from what was intended as a training aid, into an adult collectable hobby. Many women took pride in their baby houses and took them into marriage as their personal treasure. Once again England followed Holland which had their doll’s houses about fifty years before England did.

The arrival on the scene of doll’s houses in Holland and England justified the excitement of collecting silver toys. It was somewhere to put them, and it gave a purpose and justified the expense. With thousands of toys being produced in Holland, far more than they required for their own need, they exported toys to England. Germany, France, Holland and England were on good trading terms at that time, although in England we were making some toys our selves.

 In the early eighteenth century the Duchess of Schwarzenburg created a baby house she called ‘Mon Plaisir’. It consisted of a hundred rooms and was supposed to represent daily life at court. Some ladies were so obsessed with their doll’s houses that they spent more money than they could afford on them. The ladies took their doll’s houses with them when they married, and continued building their collections. Frau Negges in Augsburg spent so much on her doll’s house that she financially damaged her estate. Arnoldus van Greffen and Frederick van Strant were the most prolific of the silver toymakers in Amsterdam at this time of the surplus. There is no doubt about it that as described on trade cards of that period, silver toys were being exported to London and Paris.

The English baby houses were a little later in becoming established in comparison to the Dutch, and they were smaller than the Dutch doll’s house. Despite the size of the houses, there were plenty of silver toys in England. The question is: what happened to them? Where did they go? There must have been at one time hundreds, if not thousands, of silver toys, including those we made ourselves and those which were imported from Holland,

We have in England our own baby houses, one of the most famous being the Westbrook house or Killer house, so named because it was donated by Mr Killer to the V&A Museum (see below, Figure 6, p. 64). It was built by tradesmen on the Isle of Dogs, London, and given to a small girl, Elizabeth Westbrook, as a present in 1705. A large handsome oak cabinet standing on its own six legs, it is decorated in the fashion of an eighteenth-century wealthy man’s house, and is fashioned in that style. There are many pieces of silver toys in it, including beds, fireplaces, pots, pans and kettles.


Figure 6     Westbrook doll’s house, showing the kitchen with silver miniature pots hanging on the wall. Courtesy of Victoria     & Albert Museum. 


Figure 7 The Victorian lounge in my doll’s house, using 25 pieces of silver from my own collection which are a mixture of English and Dutch pieces. Total value today: £900.  


Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver Travels, confirms in his story in 1726 how the Queen of Brobdingnag ordered for Gulliver furniture for his convenience in his room. Gulliver goes on to relate:

 

I had an entire set of silver dishes and plates, and other necessaries which in proportion to those of the queen, were not much bigger than those I have seen in a London toyshop for the furniture of a baby house.

 

This interest in doll’s houses was helped along by the collection of Queen Mary who presented her own doll’s house to the Museum of London. Queen Mary was also fortunate to be given two other doll’s houses, one being Titania’s Palace. This was given to her in 1922. This doll’s house was until recently on loan to Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset where the public was able to see it. The other was a doll’s house given to her by the nation in 1924 and designed by Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944). An eminent twentieth-century architect, he was commissioned by Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to build a doll’s house for Queen Mary who was a very keen collector of the ‘tiny craft’. He gathered together the finest painters, silversmiths and skilled craftsmen to create what was known, when presented to Her Majesty, as ‘Queen Mary’s Doll’s House’ and which is still on display to the public at Windsor Castle. This house is the better of the two and contains a very impressive collection of very fine authentic Georgian silver toys from that period.

The doll’s houses themselves made excellent display cabinets. Apart from Holland and England, very little miniature silver was produced in the eighteenth century. America produced some silver toys. There is an eighteenth-century doll’s house in which there is a covered dish made by Peter Biermann in 1709. The doll’s house is in the Historisches Museum, Basle.

When equipping a doll’s house with furniture and tableware, even when keeping the objects to scale, the tableware was very tiny, yet items of furniture were made of silver and were naturally much larger, but still intended for the doll’s house. This is seen in the Westbrook doll’s house which is equipped with silver beds, fires complete with irons and tongs etc., wardrobes, tables, chairs and every item of kitchenware imaginable that was in use in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.

In other countries that made doll’s houses they didn’t have a problem, as they didn’t fit their doll’s houses out with silver furniture. The German doll’s houses, which were filled with pewter and copper utensils, were used as training aids, to teach girls how a house should be laid out and the utensils that were required to furnish it. The fittings in the doll’s house depended on the wealth of the owner as to whether it was brass and pewter or silver. The wealthy Hapsburg family had gold utensils in their doll’s house.

If proof were needed that the doll’s house was first and foremost a training aid then witness the following letter written in 1765 by a Mr Paul von Stetten:

 

Concerning the training of maidens, I must make reference to the playthings many of them played with until they were brides, namely the so called Baby Houses.

 

It was quite normal for many of the young brides to take their doll’s house into their marriage, and continue to collect silver toys. Unfortunately, few pieces of German silver remain that are not already part of a museum doll’s house. This makes it appear that they were solely intended for this purpose.

There is even an example of a doll’s house made in the same style as the Dutch ones. It was a present from Queen Anne to her goddaughter Ann Sharp.