Toward a new kind of society

The images here illustrate the social transformations going on in some corners of seventeenth-century Europe—notably in the Dutch Republic and Britain, the primary beneficiaries of the growing importance of the Atlantic to Europe's economy. As the wealthiest, most innovative society in Europe, the Dutch Republic experienced an explosion of artistic production. One result for historians is excellent documentation of daily life there. The painting below (it depicts a middle-class home in the mid-seventeenth century) shows how comfortable that life was. Note the size and number of the glass windows, the tiled floor, and especially the landscape painting on the wall; this economy generated enough discretionary income to sustain a large art market. The four main figures are nicely but not richly dressed, and they suggest some of the other purchasing choices available in this period: one man smokes, another drinks from an elegant wine glass, and the woman is playing cards with one of the men. (Manufacturing playing cards was a big business in the seventeenth century, an offshoot of the printing and paper technologies that had developed over the previous century.)


(From Wikimedia Commons, under a creative commons license.)

The second picture shows a similar scene: a comfortable interior, with a picture above the mantel, a musical instrument hanging on the bed, and even a pet cat (note that the cat has a collar with a bell). The couple is playing chess, a sign of the wife's sophistication, and in fact she seems to be winning.


(From the The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.)

The third picture makes the same point, by showing a young woman engrossed in writing: women were highly literate in this society, and it did not seem threatening to display their command of writing. In this picture as in the previouos one, a Persian rug has been used as a table covering—a sign not only of wealth, but also of awareness of the world beyond Europe.


(The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.)

Finally, a diagram of the Newcomen steam engine, the first commercially viable mineral-based energy source. These were used in the coal mines of northern England from the early eighteenth century; though inefficient, they worked well enough that by 1750 they were being used elsewhere in Europe and in the Americas.


(From Wikimedia Commons.)