Knitting in Five Dutch Images: Painting, Print and Photograph
Research and writing: DDUJA KNIT / 뜨자뜨개
A historical picture of knitting invites a maker to look for the needles first. Yet what does it prove about the life beyond the frame? Five Rijksmuseum records help answer that question carefully. Two are oil paintings by Bernardus Johannes Blommers, two are prints based on other images, and one is a portrait photograph made in Utrecht. All are catalogued within the nineteenth century, but they do not depict one person, workshop or continuous local custom. The useful task is to read what each medium and catalogue entry actually preserves, and resist turning artistic representation into an unrecorded biography.
Two dune paintings, two different objects
SK-A-3075, Girl Knitting in the Dunes, shows a girl seated on a dune with the sea in the distance. The museum dates this signed Blommers oil on panel to about 1870–1900 and gives dimensions of 30 by 20.7 cm. Neither a finished garment nor a pattern is identified in the card. The coastal setting does not prove that the sitter belonged to a fishing family or made maritime clothing. That story would require evidence outside this picture. The small panel instead documents how an artist framed a knitter against a landscape.
SK-A-1327 is a separate Girl Knitting by the same painter. The record dates it to 1885–86, describes a girl knitting in a dune landscape, and identifies oil on canvas rather than oil on panel. It measures 51 by 40.5 cm. Similar titles and settings should not collapse two accession numbers into one artwork. They show that the subject recurred in Blommers’s work, but the cards do not identify the girls as the same person or describe a sequence of sittings. The support, scale and catalogue descriptions offer firmer points of comparison than a guessed personal narrative.
In both paintings, knitting is visible in a coastal setting, while material sourcing, payment, household arrangements and the wearer of a finished item remain outside the frame. A painting may open social-historical questions, but it is not a census of how often women knitted in the Netherlands. Nor is it a precise textile sample from which to measure needle gauge. These are two distinct collection photographs of two distinct paintings.
A print about watching and learning
RP-P-1909-1567 bears the Dutch title Een meisje leert haar zusje breien, a girl teaching her younger sister to knit. The Rijksmuseum description says one girl sits with knitting and another looks over her shoulder. The printmaker is Petrus Johannes Arendzen, after a painting by an anonymous artist; the broad date is 1856–1900. Its physical description is an etching printed on chine collé, 330 by 254 mm. These are the dimensions of the print, not its needles or fabric. Because it reproduces another image, it cannot be presented as a photograph Arendzen took of a documented lesson.
The title supplies the idea of teaching. The visible and catalogued minimum is a knitter and an observer. The entry does not give their names, ages, family register or stitch instruction. It is therefore evidence that teaching knitting could be pictured, rather than direct evidence for a specific curriculum. The museum also notes a bust of a young man in the margin. Nothing in the card establishes him as a participant in the learning scene. Keeping the caption narrow preserves the print’s interest without assigning unsupported identities.
A named photographer and an unnamed sitter
RP-F-00-5215 is a carte-de-visite titled Portrait of an older lady with knitting. Abraham Adrianus Vermeulen made the albumen photograph in Utrecht; the museum dates it to 1854–70 and records a size of 106 by 62 mm. Unlike a painted figure, someone posed before a camera. Yet the sitter is unnamed in the catalogue. Her portrait does not tell us whether she knitted every day, taught others, took paid work or posed with an activity she enjoyed only occasionally. The difference between the recorded photographer and unidentified sitter is itself an important limit of the archive.
When using the photograph as evidence, separate the object in view from the biography we might wish to recover. The title establishes the knitting theme. It does not make this woman a named designer or representative of a national occupation. Even enlarging hands and yarn would not turn the small albumen print into a working pattern. A still photograph records a pose, not a sequence of stitch movements. Recording that limitation is more responsible than inventing a life for the sitter.
The doorway knitter and several makers of one print
RP-P-1903-A-24176, The Little Knitter, is dated 1860. The museum credits Johann Wilhelm Kaiser as printmaker after a painting by Jozef Israëls. It also names Kemink & Zoon as publisher in Utrecht and J.F. Brugman as printer in Amsterdam. One image therefore has several documented production roles. The description places a young woman with knitting in a doorway, with a ball of yarn at her feet. This photograph shows the museum’s print, not the original painted surface. The image can be studied as a depiction of knitting while the identities of a model or the fate of her fabric remain unknown.
The material description lists engraving, roulette and aquatint. Those are printmaking techniques that shape tones on paper, not names of knitting stitches. The visible yarn ball cannot reveal the fibre, needle size or full construction of the small piece in the woman’s hands. Comparison with Arendzen’s print is useful: both transfer a knitting scene into a reproducible medium. In one record the source painter, publisher and printer are named; in the other, the painting’s maker is anonymous. Catalogue specificity varies from object to object.
What a pattern reader can learn
The first distinction is between an image of knitting and a knitted object. These museum holdings are paintings, prints and a photograph; their media are paint and support, ink and paper, or an albumen image. The depicted loops are not surviving knitted samples. We cannot calculate gauge, fibre weight or stitch count reliably from these images. If the goal is to reconstruct an actual historic textile, search its object record for a specific construction term such as knitted, woven, crochet or embroidered, and read material and dimensions separately.
Together, the five records show knitting pictured at different ages and in different settings. They do not show a single social group or prove how common a practice was throughout the Netherlands. Maker, medium, dimensions and approximate dates can largely be checked; the sitters’ individual lives and the objects they worked on cannot. That narrower conclusion makes the pictures more valuable, not less. A modern knitter can appreciate their composition and historical visibility while leaving space for the people and techniques the archive has not documented.
Primary records and reuse terms
- Rijksmuseum SK-A-3075, Girl Knitting in the Dunes (Bernardus Johannes Blommers, c. 1870–1900)
- Rijksmuseum SK-A-1327, Girl Knitting (Bernardus Johannes Blommers, 1885–1886)
- Rijksmuseum RP-P-1909-1567, Een meisje leert haar zusje breien (Petrus Johannes Arendzen, 1856–1900)
- Rijksmuseum RP-F-00-5215, Portret van een oudere dame met breiwerk (Abraham Adrianus Vermeulen, 1854–1870)
- Rijksmuseum RP-P-1903-A-24176, The Little Knitter (Johann Wilhelm Kaiser (I), 1860)
- Rijksmuseum data reuse policy
The five photographs depict five separate collection objects. Each object record marks Copyright as Public domain. The displayed files are the actual images observed on their record pages. The museum policy allows commercial and noncommercial reuse of public-domain material and asks for attribution. Image rights and factual claims were checked separately.