Dummy Boards
If you want to up your game for next year’s Halloween decorations and gain some points for historical accuracy, why not make your own dummy board? Quite the thing in 17th century homes, and perfect for scaring unsuspecting guests.
Houses in various parts of the world have recently been decorated for Halloween, with cobwebs strung across doorways and skeletons emerging from lawns or wheelie bins. Perhaps some have cut out silhouettes in windows, mimicking Frankenstein’s monster or witches flying across the sky with a broomstick and cat. In England, decorating houses for Halloween seems to have gained popularity of late, although some of the techniques deployed are actually centuries old.
Woman with a Broom, dummy board made in England between 1630 and 1650, artist unknown, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Placing figures around a house has a historical precedent in the form of dummy boards, life-size, flat, wooden cut-outs painted to resemble real people. These figures, which could depict servants, soldiers, children, or even pets, were popular from the 1600s, and seem to have had several uses, including to startle and scare.
They were constructed from wooden planks, covered in a canvas, painted with oils and fixed to a bracket at the back so that they would stand independently. They were only a few inches thick, but the edges were bevelled and rounded off to given the figures a sense of three-dimensionality.
Information on the website of the Victoria and Albert museum, which has some examples of dummy boards from the 1630s, points to their origins in trompe-l’oeil painting*, where artists created illusionistic works which tricked the viewer into believing the objects, places or people depicted were really there. It was a style and technique particularly associated with Dutch artists in the early 17th century.
Apparently the dummy boards were often placed in corners or on stairways to surprise visitors. It is easy to imagine them startling a visitor in the dim light of evening, with flickering candlelight casting movements and shadows which would have enhanced the realistic effect of the boards.
Historians are unable to attach a particular purpose to dummy boards, and there are many theories as to their use — were they simply decorative? Did they have a moralising intent, representing virtues (this woman with a broom could have represented orderliness, cleanliness and duty) and reminding household members of proper conduct? Or were they more practical, perhaps placed to deter intruders by suggesting the presence of servants or guards? Some have even suggested a psychological role: that these painted figures offered a quiet sense of company in large, draughty houses, their lifelike forms lending warmth and presence to otherwise empty rooms. Whatever their function, they remain one of the most curious fusions of art, humour and domestic life in early modern Britain and Europe — at once decorative and disconcerting, familiar yet faintly uncanny.
Their uncanniness comes from the way they conjure a presence in the house that isn’t really there. Like stories of ghosts and phantoms, they hover between the seen and the unseen, the living and the imagined. In this way, they feel especially fitting for Halloween — a festival with roots in pagan traditions around a time when it was believed that the veil between this world and the spirit world was at its thinnest.
So next October, as you tuck a cardboard ghost into a corner or perch a life-sized skeleton by the fireplace, spare a thought for these centuries-old “dummy boards” — the original household tricksters, quietly keeping watch and adding a little thrill to the home.
Dummy Boards from left to right: Woman with a Mirror (1640s, English) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Boy and Girl (1690s, Dutch), the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Man with a cane (1690s, English) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
*The tradition of trompe-l’oeil was one of the themes in the Autumn issue of Artful Magazine, currently on sale and available here. In it you can read about Zeuxis and Parrhasius, a legend of trompe-l’oeil painting in antiquity, and Samuel van Hoogstraten, an expert in the genre. Other articles explore the development of our alphabet, the use of monograms over several millenia and Anne Boleyn’s famous “B” necklace.