Fotoreproductie van het schilderij 'Een vrouw met een kind in een kelderkamer' door Pieter de Hooch 1893 - 1912

This is a photographic reproduction by Johan Marinus Schalekamp of a painting by Pieter de Hooch, both Dutch artists. The photograph, taken sometime before 1912, depicts a woman with a child in a sparsely furnished room. The appeal of genre paintings like de Hooch’s, and the market for photographic reproductions of them, speaks to the rise of a Dutch bourgeois class in the 17th century and the consolidation of that class through the 19th. The scene appears to celebrate domesticity and family affection, values that resonated with the social aspirations of middle-class families. Schalekamp’s photographic copy speaks to the popular desire to consume and circulate these images. A close examination of auction and museum records, as well as periodicals from the late 19th century, can reveal the extent to which images of domesticity played a role in solidifying social values and class identity. The meaning of art, as this object reveals, is always contingent on social and institutional contexts.