Dutch life on 'Lange Eylandt' on exhibit at New York Historical

Before it was Long Island, it was Lange Eylandt.

For the Dutch settlers in the 1600s who colonized the Island and the rest of what was named New Netherland, life in the New World mirrored the Old World.

But as today, life in New Amsterdam — the southernmost 16 streets at the tip of Manhattan Island that would become New York City — reflected a divide.

"It was the difference between a small city and farming villages. So they were humbler, they were simpler, they were more rural," said author Russell Shorto, co-curator of the "Old Masters, New Amsterdam" exhibition at The New York Historical in Manhattan, which closes Sunday.

The show explores life during the decades when the Dutch were in control, from 1624 to 1664.

Three centuries and several wars later, New Amsterdam would blossom into one of the world’s premier cities, and those rural communities would be converted into America’s first car suburb.

Dutch control eventually went as far east as roughly modern Oyster Bay Town — in modern day Nassau County. The eastern half of the Island, now Suffolk, had been colonized by the British, who eventually took over all of New Netherland where Peter Stuyvesant was the colony's director.

The exhibit uses 60 Dutch paintings from the 17th century to imagine what life was like in the colony.

"We’re using these images that were created in Europe to reflect what it must have been like, because here, they were trying very much to emulate life in the home country," Shorto said. "They were building gabled houses, and, you know, they had the same kind of clothing, and they were doing the same festivals and things like that."

Lange Eylandt is shown on a map by the cartographer Nicolaes Visscher depicting the Eastern Seaboard, just above stereotypes of Native Americans.

The farther east in the Dutch colonies, the more rural. And the border was constantly in flux.

None of the paintings actually depict Colonial life — numerous written records exist but almost nothing visual — but the  show hypothesizes that the art is a window into life in New Netherland as the colonists reincarnated the mores, attitudes, sensibilities, culture, supplies, and Dutch traditions from the Old World.

"People in the Dutch villages on Long Island had farms," Shorto said.

The paintings illustrate what was a relatively modern way of thinking about the home that the Dutch of the time pioneered: the home as "a private space centered around a nuclear family," the exhibition guide says.

The show depicts both the kind of Native peoples the Dutch colonized, people who lived on the land long before the settlers arrived and who were displaced, and Black residents, those brought against their will beginning only a year after New Amsterdam’s founding.

From the beginning, the colony echoed the Dutch policy of religious tolerance, despite outbursts of intolerance against Jews, Quakers and Lutherans.

"The Dutch policy of religious toleration spawned an unusually pluralistic society," the guide says, "in which at least 18 languages were spoken."

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.