This dataset contains the results of research into the representation of women in the paintings in the collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum, National Maritime Museum of the Netherlands in Amsterdam. In the set it is recorded for each painting if there are women, men, persons, or no persons depicted on it. Furthermore, I have recorded the surroundings depicted on the paintings as far as possible. The list is based on the collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum, including long term loans (among which paintings from the NK-collectie), as present in 2024.
This publication is part of the project 'Met vrouwen in zee. De representatie van vrouwen in maritieme schilderkunst' with file number 333.22.002 of the research programme Muzeumbeurzen which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
The paintings referenced in this database can be found via https://collectie.hetscheepvaartmuseum.nl/search/Collection%20online.
The dataset is created for the publication: Suze Zijlstra, ‘Onlookers or participants? Representations of women on Dutch maritime paintings in the Age of Sail’, in Yearbook of Women’s History / Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis, vol. 43, nr. 2025: Women and Ports, Amsterdam University Press, 2025, https://doi.org/10.5117/JVG2025.002.ZIJL.
For this research I have gone manually gone through 669 paintings held at Het Scheepvaartmuseum. The list is based on the collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum, including long term loans (among which paintings from the NK-collectie), as present in 2024. In my manual count, I recorded if there were people depicted, and if so if they were male, female, or a person – in case their presented gender was impossible to establish, including cases in which the people depicted were too small to tell. I have based my count on the way that people were depicted, rather than on my knowledge of a particular time. Even though it used to be forbidden for women to enlist in the Dutch navy, I have not automatically assumed that women were not depicted in an early modern naval war painting. To establish if people were men or women, I have particularly relied on the clothing, which was a useful starting point at least until the early twentieth century. Men are often depicted with a type of hat that women do not wear, women on the other hand wear dresses and often a white cap. It is important to emphasize that this binary division is based on what the painter has depicted, not historical reality. So even though we know, for instance, that women dressed as men, and transgender men, boarded ships to work as sailors, it is impossible to recognize differences in this sense in the way people are depicted. Finally, I focused on people who were supposed to be (born) alive. While we see women on ships carved as figureheads, I have not included them in the present analysis. Next to the people depicted, I have recorded the surroundings as far as possible, including a sea background without any land to be seen ('sea'), sea with land in the background ('land background'), a harbour view ('harbour'), and 'other' for any other settings (for instance, paintings set along a river).
