I used this tool to reflect on a ceiling in a canal house in Amsterdam, where I work, which looked very British to me. A merchant called George Luden, who belonged to the Scottish Church, owned the house since 1833. Does the ceiling go back to his time, or should we date it around 1900? Apart from one ceiling in Leiden designed by James Wyatt, the main inspiration for Dutch interior decoration came from France or Italy. We have a blind spot for British influence on Dutch art and architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (gardens excepted of course).
In order to find out what it could be, I searched the Soane Museum website for ceiling designs of around 1770-1820. Here I found many drawings for ceilings with a similar design. British ceilings are usually covered with ornaments, while the Dutch tend to stress the outline of a room, as well as the middle by using ornaments. We like the rectangular, while the British have a strong preference for the square, even when the main form of the ceiling is rectangular. The square in itself is of course a more classical form than the rectangular (compare Leonardo’s Vitruvian man). In that sense the Amsterdam ceiling is very close to the designs of Robert Adam and Giuseppe Manocchi, who probably studied the drawings by Francesco Bartoli of antique ceilings in Rome.
Out of pure curiosity, my visit to the website lead to a second search: is there any Dutch material in the collection of Sir John Soane’s Museum? Two drawings caught my eye, which were catalogued as unknown.
