Inner and back rooms on ground floor
3 Inner room (binnekamer)
Dimensions
length: 30% of 13.20 / 43.30
width: 50% of 5.1 meters (16.73 feet) and then same length and 25% of 5.1 m
size: XX square meters (XX square feet)
This space between work life and family life was the smallest of the three rooms on the ground floor. It had no window to the outside, but it had both a leaded glass window and a door to the front room. Whoever was minding the store could keep an eye on it through the window and get easy access to it when a customer entered. The stores' financial records could have kept there. This inner room also had a fireplace, the only source of heat for the front room, too. Perhaps the lounge chair was convenient for napping between customers.
After all the stuff in this room was inventoried, what remained were a mirror and a few pieces of furniture.
Making Maria's inventory, the notaries listed household furnishings and goods (huijsraad en imboel) and paintings on page 30v (right; click to enlarge).
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4 Back room (agterkamer)
Dimensions
length: 30% of 13.20 / 43.30
width: 50% of 5.1 meters (16.73 feet) and then same length and 25% of 5.1 m
size: XX square meters (XX square feet)
This room would have been the family's main room for living and eating. The walls had ten family portraits, his daughter Maria, from his first marriage, his father Philips, his second wife, Cornelia, and three people in the most distinguished branch of her ancentry, the Uijtenbroeks, her mother's family. Throughout the sixteenth century, members of the Uijtenbroek family (also spelled Uyttenbrouck, among other variants) served on Delft's Veertigraad and as mayors, magistrates, and orphan masters. The portrait of Leeuwenhoek listed in the inventory was probably the one by his neighbor Johannes Verkolje; it now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The two prints may well have been the copperplate version of the painting that Verkolje also made in the mid-1680s.
As in the front room, the walls of this back room were covered with paintings. In addition to the ten family portraits, the walls had fourteen other paintings, landscapes and still lifes of flowers, fish, and hunted game. I can find no record of a painter named J. van Leeuwen among the Delft St. Luke's guild members nor through an online search. The only J. van Leeuwen in Leeuwenhoek's extended family was his nephew Johannes van Leeuwen, born in Rotterdam, the cashier of the Bank van Leening in Zierikzee.
Making Maria's inventory, the notaries listed household furnishings and goods (huijsraad en imboel) and paintings in this back room on page 30v of the inventory (right; click to enlarge).
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gerridons
Guéridons were low, usually round, end tables or side tables with three or four legs. They might hold a candle or vase.
