The Dollhouse of Petronella Oortman painted by Jacob Appel, (1680–1751), circa 1710. Wikipedia
5. Making Miniatures
As a wedding gift from her husband, Nella receives a dollhouse replica of her prestigious new home, and commissions items to furnish it from a local miniaturist…who begins sending eerily insightful items far beyond Nella’s requests. In order to create the dollhouse, the production — which, unlike our titular miniaturist, was not in possession of supernatural or otherwise mysterious miniature-making skills — turned to Mulvany & Rogers, designers of one-twelfth scale bespoke miniatures and dollhouses. Working their own magic through historical research and replicating the props from the production, they produced numerous miniature items (the parakeet cage, a stringed lute) themselves, while commissioning other items from more specialized artisans, who created everything from tiny pastries to a hand-carved wooden cradle.
6. Authentic Costumes
The Miniaturist‘s costumes — from lush gowns to drenched blacks to Rembrandt-evoking hats—were all the result of deep research into Dutch trade, religion, and society as portrayed in paintings by late Golden Age Dutch Masters, period household documents, and other resources from Dutch museum archives. Costume designer Joanna Eatwell (also of Wolf Hall), whenever possible, employed **, which means lots of hand sewing of fibers that were available at the time — absolutely no zippers, no Velcro, and no polyester allowed. The principle behind the technique allows costumes to have their truly authentic fits and shapes, since they are made the way they were at the time, with the fabrics of the time. The Miniaturist, says Eatwell, “was pure pleasure to work on… Most of all we seek to share our joy in the period through the costumes that appear on the screen.”
*The Rijksmuseum has three dolls' houses that provide a detailed view of how affluent houses were once furnished. The most famous was collected by the wealthy Petronella Oortman of Amsterdam. In the 17th century, dolls' houses were not toys; they were a hobby, the equivalent for women of the collection cabinets kept by men.
What makes Petronella Oortman’s dolls' house so unusual is that all the pieces were made precisely to scale, in the same way and using the same materials as their regular counterparts. Petronella ordered her miniature porcelain from China and commissioned cabinetmakers, glassblowers, silversmiths, basket-weavers and artists to furnish her dolls' house: an extremely expensive hobby. Her dolls' house cost as much as an actual house on a canal! She was so proud of her house, that she had it portrayed in a painting.
The second 17th-century dolls' house, which belonged to Petronella Dunois, contains ready-made furniture, including a large amount of miniature silver. In the third dolls' house, made in the 18th century, it is the exterior which is especially interesting: rather than built as a cupboard, it is actually a model of a real house.
Editor's Note: On a Netherlands trip we visited the Rijksmuseum and viewed these doll houses ... there's even a little staircase and platform to view the house more closely.
It is a deeply vexing phrase. “Practice” is a term that sounds as if it referred to something concrete, even purposive: a way of doing things adopted by a group of people. “Original,” on the other hand, is teasingly ambiguous, suggesting, as it seems to, that these practices are new – inventive, revolutionary, a break with the way things have been done – although it, in fact, means the opposite: that these practices are a return to the origins, a break with modern ways of doing things not under the dictate of originality, but with a desire to find a path back to the moment of origination of a certain kind of theatre. Being original here means being reactionary: finding the new in the very old. But though “original” may seem like the more slippery of the two terms, it is the reassuring concreteness of “practice” that deserves closer scrutiny.
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