Sunday Morning by Hendrik Jacobus Scholten (1865–1868).
Sunday Morning, painted by Dutch artist Hendrik Jacobus Scholten in the mid-19th century, presents an idealized domestic scene that echoes the spirit and aesthetics of the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age. While executed during the Romantic period, the painting pays deliberate homage to the values, interiors, and atmosphere of an earlier, revered time in Dutch history.
The composition centers around two women—an elderly lady seated by the fireplace and a young woman, likely her daughter or caretaker, reading aloud from a Bible. The younger woman is elegantly dressed in a lustrous silver-grey gown with a lace collar, typical of 17th-century upper-middle-class fashion. Her hair is neatly styled, and her posture is modest yet attentive. She sits on a low stool, slightly turned toward the older woman, projecting humility and devotion.
The elderly woman, wearing a dark cloak with fur trimming and a traditional white cap, listens intently. Her position near the hearth, in a high-backed wooden armchair, evokes the iconography of age, wisdom, and domestic authority often seen in 17th-century portraits of matriarchs.
The room is a well-appointed Dutch interior, lit softly from the left. A grand fireplace dominates the back wall, with a sculpted frieze of classical putti resting on the mantel—an ornamental detail that would have been found in wealthier 17th-century homes. Above the mantel hangs a portrait of a stern-looking man, possibly a deceased patriarch, anchoring the family's continuity and memory.
Other details—tiled flooring, oak paneling, restrained color palette, and decorative yet modest household objects—evoke a typically Protestant, bourgeois home in the Dutch Republic.
The subject matter—a family Bible reading on Sunday morning—speaks directly to Protestant values dominant in the 17th-century Netherlands: faith, family, moral education, and the sanctity of the Sunday. The act of reading scripture together reflects the importance of personal piety and literacy, values encouraged in Calvinist households. The absence of overt church symbols (no crucifix, no icons) underlines a Reformed emphasis on inner devotion over ecclesiastical ritual.
The generational aspect—the young woman reading to the older—emphasizes filial duty and the transmission of religious values across time. In 17th-century Dutch painting, such themes were often subtly moralizing: they celebrated domestic virtue and encouraged reflection on mortality, aging, and the righteous life.
Moreover, the meticulous attention to furnishings and clothing connects to genre painting of the Dutch Golden Age, where everyday scenes were imbued with ethical overtones and precise social coding.
Although painted in the 1860s, Sunday Morning is more than nostalgic. Scholten’s work is part of a 19th-century Romantic trend in the Netherlands that looked back to the Golden Age as a source of national identity, moral strength, and aesthetic inspiration. The scene is idealized, free of disorder or social tension, and meant to embody timeless values of calm, order, and devotion.
In doing so, Scholten creates not just a domestic tableau, but a kind of moral memory—a visual reassurance that the virtues of the past can still guide the present.