HAARLEM.- Children and grown-ups alike will find enchantment in a gallery full of dolls’ house rooms in the Frans Hals Museum. A magical collage of seventy little rooms, some in 3D, has been created from real seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dolls’ houses. Visitors can get close enough to discover details that often remain hidden. The display was inspired by one of the highlights of the Frans Hals Museum—the monumental dolls’ house put together by the Amsterdam merchant’s wife Sara Rothé.

Art Cabinets
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dolls’ houses are rare; in the Netherlands only six have survived. They were commissioned by grown women and were certainly not toys. It was an expensive hobby and only women in the circle of wealthy merchants and governors in Amsterdam and Leiden could afford one. The showpiece dolls’ houses contain a wealth of information about the everyday life of that time. The Frans Hals Museum owns a dolls’ house that was conceived by Sara Rothé, wife of the Amsterdam merchant Jacob Ploos van Amstel. Between 1743 and 1751 she created two dolls’ houses using components from three older ones, giving us a glimpse of the luxurious interior of an eighteenth-century home on one of Amsterdam’s canals. Dolls’ House in the Spotlight uses elements from Sara Rothé’s dolls’ house and images of similar dolls’ houses in the Haags Gemeentemuseum, the Rijksmuseum and the Centraal Museum.

For All Ages
Two picture hunt booklets accompany the exhibition: one for children from 5 to 7 and one for the 8 to 11-year-olds. Following clues and investigating the little rooms, they learn all sorts of things about life and living in earlier times. At special tables in the gallery young visitors can put together their own dolls’ room with miniature elements. This does not mean that Dolls’ House in the Spotlight is just for children; grown-up visitors will also delight in discovering untold fascinating details in this dolls’ house paradise.

I Spy With My Little Eye …
As of 13 November Dolls’ House in the Spotlight will be part of I Spy with My Little Eye … where visitors will be invited to take a very close look at the Frans Hals Museum’s collection. In an age when everything in the museum world has to be big, bigger, biggest, the Frans Hals Museum, always on a human scale, has chosen to do the opposite. Starting in November the museum will be zooming in on detail, on the barely visible, on the small things that are often overlooked but are so very interesting. The building houses a wealth of such tiny visual secrets, each with its own story: pictures on tiles, beautifully decorated ornaments, small silver utensils and, of course, all those details in paintings. There is a whole other world to discover in the Frans Hals Museum: the world of detail, of what is seemingly hidden from view—even the invisible! The museum will take visitors on a voyage of discovery, like Gulliver on the island of Lilliput. It is a voyage for all ages, one on which visitors will learn to look more keenly, to read images more effectively and develop an eye for detail, for the concealed and for the imaginary.