De Drie Hendricken

Three houses, three figures

On the Bloemgracht, in the Jordaan, three narrow houses stand side by side at numbers 87, 89 and 91. Their fronts are almost identical. Each has a stepped gable, and in the band under it, the frieze, sits a small carved and painted figure. One is a townsman, one a countryman, one a sailor. The trio is known as De Drie Hendricken.

This is a short stop, ten or fifteen minutes. It suits anyone who likes to read a street slowly. There is nothing to book and nothing to queue for. You stand on the pavement and look up.

What to look for

Cross to the opposite side of the canal so all three fronts fit in your view. Start at the top. The gable stones are called De Steeman, De Landman and De Seeman. They stand for three ways of life in the Dutch Republic of the 1600s: life in town, life on the land and life at sea.

Then look at the colours. They are based on paintings of the period, by artists such as Pieter de Hooch, Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen. The sculptor Wil Abels settled the palette during the restoration.

Find the year stone, which reads ANNO 1642. Notice the bands and blocks of natural stone set into the brick. This is the Amsterdam Renaissance style.

Now lower your eyes to the ground floor. The wall above rests on a heavy beam, the puibalk. Below it is a wooden front with cross-frame windows, shutters and leaded glass. Together the three houses are treated as a teaching example of how the city built in the 1600s. Each one is a classic Amsterdam hall house, with a sunken hearth and a raised side room inside.

A story that is not quite true

It is easy to assume the figures show the trades of the first residents. They do not. The stones do not refer to the people who lived here, and the names along their bottom edges were only added in later centuries. Read them instead as a small picture of the society that built the street.

The houses had a hard time later. By the early twentieth century they were badly decayed. The Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser bought them between 1927 and 1929. Then, between 1942 and 1947, the architect Jan de Meijer carried out a thorough restoration.

The nineteenth-century ground-floor fronts were taken away. The wooden fronts you see now were rebuilt in 1946 and 1947, based on traces found in the buildings. Inside, the old layout was largely brought back, with a tall front room, a spindle staircase, a raised side room and a lower kitchen by the original hearth.

Whether it was right to rebuild toward a supposed original state was argued about at the time. It is a good question to carry with you as you look at the facades. In 1970 each house became a national monument in its own right.