Tapestry covered chair, tapestry covered pillows

Six tapestry covered chairs,'zes tapyte stoelen' in the room above the cellar, room B.

We find regular chairs all over the Thins/Vermeer home. To the right an example painted by Vermeer in The Geographer. See also one in the Woman with Pearls, Berlin.

Delft boasted famous tapestry workshops; the most famous were those owned by Maximiliaan van der Gucht and François Spiering (see their names on the Map of Delft).

After the great fire of the Delft town hall the city fathers ordered a set of tapestry covered chairs around 1620. One of them survives in the Prinsenhof Museum.

The illustration on th eright shows a tapestry covered chair such as shown on 'The Geographer' Staedelsches Museum, Frankfurt an Main. Possibly this one resembled the one which was 50% property of both Catherine and her mother Maria Thins.

Note : This object was part of the Vermeer-inventory as listed by the clerk working for Delft notary public J. van Veen. He made this list on February 29, 1676, in the Thins/Vermeer home located on Oude Langendijk on the corner of Molenpoort. The painter Johannes Vermeer had died there at the end of December 1675. His widow Catherina and their eleven children still lived there with her mother Maria Thins.

The transcription of the 1676 inventory, now in the Delft archives, is based upon its first full publication by A.J.J.M. van Peer, "Drie collecties..." in Oud Holland 1957, pp. 98-103. My additions and explanations are added within square brackets [__]. Dutch terms have been checked against the world's largest language dictionary, the Dictionary of the Dutch Language (Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal , or WNT), which was begun by De Vries en Te Winkel in 1882. In 2001 many textile terms have been kindly explained by art historian Marieke te Winkel.

'Tapestry Manufacture in Delft' in Vermeer and the Delft School, exhibition catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City and Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 512-521.

This page forms part of a large encyclopedic site on Vermeer and Delft. Research by Drs. Kees Kaldenbach (email). A full presentation is on view at johannesvermeer.info.

Launched December, 2002; Last update March 2, 2017.

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