Dutch brass is the term for brassware made in the Netherlands and the neighbouring Low Countries, a region that was one of Europe's great centres of brass founding and working from the late Middle Ages onwards. It covers chandeliers, candlesticks, dishes, tobacco and spice boxes, kettles, warming pans, fire implements, coal buckets and church fittings.
Dutch brass reached its height during the seventeenth-century Golden Age, when prosperous merchants and churches commissioned fine cast and hammered pieces. The most celebrated form is the brass chandelier with a large polished globe beneath tiers of curving S-shaped arms, seen in many Dutch genre paintings and still hung in churches and grand houses. Embossed alms dishes, often decorated with biblical scenes or inscriptions, were made in great numbers in the region and exported widely. The style was much imitated, and from the nineteenth century Dutch and English foundries produced large quantities of reproduction chandeliers, candlesticks and fenders in the Dutch manner. Genuine early pieces show signs of hand finishing, casting irregularities and a soft, worn surface. Collectors look for weight, quality of casting and evidence of age, which modern polishing can sometimes disguise.
