Landschap met huis met hoge trap naar de eerste verdieping 1793

Adrianus Serné made this landscape with a house with a high staircase to the first floor as an etching. The image depicts a scene of domestic life in the Dutch countryside, probably sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. The house is the dominant feature. A family stands in front, suggesting a comfortable, middle-class existence. In this period, Dutch society was structured around a powerful merchant class, and images of domesticity were popular ways of representing social stability. The external staircase might seem unusual to us, but it reflects a practical solution for accessing living quarters above storage or workspaces. To understand this image more fully, we can look at Dutch social and economic history. Prints like these served as a kind of aspirational imagery for the rising middle class. Historians consult period documents, estate records, and other visual sources to understand the values and norms of the time.