A rare condom from 1830 will be on display at the Rijksmuseum from June 3, 2025, until the end of November this year. Probably a 200-year-old contraceptive, which is made from a sheep’s appendix, this condom shows an erotic etching.
The Museum brought the condom at auction six months ago, making it a part of the Print Room collection which holds 750,000 prints, drawings, and photographs. Being the first example in the Rijksmuseum collection of a print on a condom, the Museum revisits to provide an insight into the most sensitive topic from the past- sexuality, and prostitution in the 19th century leading to rising cases of syphilis.
The 19th century prostitution was referred to as, ‘Great Social Evil’ by many contemporaries. Being an eccentric field of academic study around the 1970s, Mazo Karras writes that the historian must ‘steer clear between the dangers of portraying prostitutes as victims by concentrating too much on how others saw them and the danger of decontextualizing them by concentrating too much on their agency’ (Houlbrook, 2006: 209).
If I talk about the rising prostitution in Dutch, it began to increase in 1904 when the Liquor Law went into force. It was to target the females in bars trying to get the male visitors to drink beer, wine, or jenever. The women who attracted these men were called animation girls since they tried to animate the men and let them pay the bill for both. These animate girls were prostitutes too. Then came the Sanitary Convention of 1916, which allowed the civilized nations and sailors of all nationalities to have free treatment of genital diseases. The invention of the drug, Penicillin made these treatments possible. This way prostitution rose in Amsterdam.
The print portrays a nun seated with her legs apart in front of three clergymen pointing a finger at one of them. The men hold their robes to display a state of sexual arousal. There is a text written over the item, Voilà mon choix, meaning ‘This is my choice’, making the print a parody of both celibacy and Judgment of Paris from Greek mythology.
With this acquisition and display, the Museum enables us to focus on 19th-century sexuality and prostitution, a subject that is underrepresented in the existing collection. It is the display of the era of lighter and darker sides of sexual health where the quest for sensual pleasure was fraught with fears of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases – especially syphilis. In addition to this, it highlights the importance of “safe sex.”
Featured Image: Anonymous, condom with print, ca. 1830. Purchase from the F.G. Waller Fund. Photo: Rijksmuseum/Kelly Schenk.
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