A Delftware basket
Most of these baskets were made in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, richly carved wooden baskets, delftware baskets like our example, even precious silver ones. These baskets were almost always presented to mark a special occasion like the birth of a child. The central panel of this extraordinary example clearly relates to a newly born baby. The scene is set in a typical interior of this period, in the middle a cradle with a women changing the baby's nappies, after an engraving by Adriaen van Ostade.
This basket was a loan exhibit for many years in Museum Lambert van Meerten in Delft and also in the Municipal Museum in Arnhem. |
