Klederdracht van Lonneker en Losser in Overijssel, 1857 1857

Ruurt de Vries made this color lithograph, titled "Costumes of Lonneker and Losser in Overijssel," in 1857. It depicts a slice of rural life in the Netherlands, a country undergoing significant social and economic changes at the time. De Vries presents us with women and children dressed in traditional local attire, a visual code that speaks to regional identity and perhaps a resistance to the homogenizing forces of modernization. The image appears to idealize the traditional costumes and the apparent simplicity of rural life. However, it’s important to remember the context in which this image was made and the institutional histories of the time. As the Netherlands industrialized, there was a growing interest in preserving and documenting regional customs, a trend fueled by Romantic nationalism. Images like these helped construct and reinforce a sense of national identity. To fully understand this artwork, we can consult historical archives and studies of Dutch social history from this period. This image is more than just a quaint depiction of rural life; it's a window into the complex interplay of identity, tradition, and modernization in the 19th-century Netherlands.