Birdcage

During the seventeenth century, birdcages became a fashionable novelty in affluent households as merchants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Dutch West India Company (WIC) brought back exotic animals from abroad.[1] Wealthy citizens of the Dutch Republic kept birds as pets, and parrots in particular were prized for their ability to mimic human speech (see 2000.259). The birdcages were typically suspended from the ceiling on cords and would have adorned the interior space.[2]
Delftware birdcages, such as this one, are exceedingly rare with only a handful surviving today. Producing a birdcage in ceramic was technically demanding as the form was prone to collapsing or warping during firing.[3] This circular birdcage is decorated in chinoiserie style with a hunting scene running along the bottom. It rests on six feet, and its underside is decorated with fowl flying around the base with a central bird gazing straight out at the viewer. Frequently featured in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life and genre paintings, birds carried sexual connotations. Birdcages often symbolized the confines of marriage, while an escaped bird might allude to a woman’s lost virginity.[4]


[1] Dominique Surh. “Young Woman in a Niche with a Parrot and Cage” in The Leiden Collection Catalogue. Ed. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Elizabeth Nogrady with Caroline Van Cauwenberge. New York, 2017.
[2] Robert D. Aronson and Celine Ariaans. “Blue and White Bird Cage” in Delftware: Collections, vol. 1: Exotic Delicacies, Flower Vases, and Menagerie. Amsterdam, 2021, p. 74.
[3] Jan Daniël van Dam. Delffse Porceleyne: Dutch delftware 1620–1850. Amsterdam: Waanders Publishers, Rijksmuseum, 2004, p. 101.
[4] Iris Moon. Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie. Exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025, pp. 90–91. Also see: Eddy de Jongh, “A Bird’s-Eye View of Erotica: Double Entendre in a Series of Seventeenth-Century Genre Scenes,” in Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting. Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1995, pp. 22–58.