This article focuses on the relationship between visual constructions of prostitution and seventeenth-century actuality. Although the Protestant Dutch Republic criminalized prostitution, it still flourished, above all, in the port city of Amsterdam. These real-life women stand in contrast to the attractive and luxuriously clad whores and the old and ugly procuresses in the bordello paintings. Ultimately, both painted types owe a greater debt to visual traditions and cultural views of women than to the historical record.
In the paintings and in prints women are depicted as seducers and men as fools, the forbidden sexuality they portray being implicitly blamed on the women, who are understood as being inspired by the devil. Brothel scenes bordeeltjes are a familiar type of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting fig. Their popularity poses many questions. In the first place: Who bought these pictures? In a country where prostitution, procuring, and adultery were criminal offenses, where the word hoererij whoredom denoted any kind of nonmarital sexual intercourse, and where religious piety was deeply felt not only by Calvinists but by people of other denominations, a market still existed for pictures of half-nude, lascivious women whose charms were obviously for sale.
Evidence suggests they found a place in the halls and living quarters of respectable people. The brothel scenes primarily depict young and beautiful girls, sometimes accomplished musicians, who always appear eager and happy fig. But the pictures also include harlots of the common sort, who are lazy and insolent, drink too much, and cheat their clients in any way they can fig. Food and music accompany the business of prostitution. The proceedings are invariably presided over by a procuress koppelaarster , a mercenary, ugly, often hideously grinning, old woman fig.
The women are usually the most active figures in the scenes. The client is often a well-dressed young man from a good family, or a farmer or peasant of more advanced age, and the men are presented as fools who notice neither the cheating nor robbing. This is the image, 6 but what can we discover about the reality of prostitution? As a phenomenon, prostitution has never been absent from Western society, and it has always posed a problem for authorities.
The policy choice is always between regulation, which makes the authorities a party to the vice, and prohibition, which cannot be totally enforced and drives the trade underground, allying it with crime.
