This room was well furnished. There were sixteen linen curtains before the glass windows, a large and valuable _kas_ covered or veneered with French nutwood, standing on two ball feet, worth £13; a great looking-glass with a black frame, a white valance before the chimney, “six cloths which they put on the shelves of the _kas_, one ditto with lace, two small calico valances before the glass windows, one red chimney cloth (probably placed over the white valance), two red striped silk curtains and two valances of the same, two green silk curtains and two embroidered valances, three grey striped silk chair cushions, four pieces of tapestry to be thrown over chests, one bedstead with white calico hangings and luxuriously supplied with cushions, and eight East India spreads, besides other spreads of flowered calico, red calico, and white calico in squares. There were five small East India boxes and a great deal of linen, also one white box marked E. W.”
PLATE XXXVI.—_The Oyster Feast, by Jan Steen. The Hague._
Figs. 35–36: CHAIRS (Seventeenth Century); Fig. 37: MARQUETRY DESIGNS (Seventeenth Century). ]
Wherever the Dutch went, they lived not only in comfort, but in all the elegance and even splendour that their means would allow. In the New or the Old World, the merchant princes surrounded themselves with sumptuous furniture of mahogany, ebony, marquetry, ivory, lacquer, teak and sandal-wood, as well as porcelain, embroideries, rugs, screens and all kinds of stamped metal and _bric-à-brac_.
In 1685, the Count de Forbin says that the General of the East India Company at Batavia has a court quite royal in numbers and brilliance. “On my arrival (at the palace), the usual guard,” he writes, “which is very numerous, stood at arms, and, between two ranks of men, I was introduced into a gallery adorned with the most beautiful Japanese porcelains.”
Evelyn and other travellers are enthusiastic in their admiration of the riches and luxury they witnessed in Holland, although, as we have seen, England was not unfamiliar with Oriental art products. The Stuarts were art connoisseurs of the first rank, and James II, to whom Macaulay denies mental and aesthetic appreciation, was an intelligent collector. The most brilliant figure in the Court of Louis XIV, the Marquis de Dangeau, notes in his _Diary_ (January 8, 1689), on the arrival of the fugitive Stuart: “The King of England found the apartments (of the Dauphin) admirable, and talked like a connoisseur of all the pictures, porcelains, crystals and other things that he saw there.”