200-year-old unused condom with saucy print draws big crowds to Dutch museum

A 200-year-old condom – still unused and still straight as an arrow – has been drawing huge crowds to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

“It’s in mint condition,” the museum’s curator Joyce Zelen told the BBC.

She said the museum inspected the condom with ultraviolet light and ascertained that it had never been used.

The rare artefact – likely a “luxury souvenir” from a fancy brothel in France – dates back to 1830. It is believed that only two such objects are known to have survived to the present day.

The condom is thought to be made of a sheep’s appendix.

It features an explicit print of a nun sitting in front of three clergymen with her dress up and her legs apart, pointing her finger at the men, all of whom are standing in front of her holding up their habits.

The condom also bears the inscription “Voila mon choix”, meaning: “There is my choice”.

The Dutch museum said the print is a “parody of both celibacy and the Judgement of Paris from Greek mythology” – the mythological story of a Trojan prince named Paris who had to decide who was the fairest goddess among Aphrodite, Hera and Athena.

The condom “embodies both the lighter and darker sides of sexual health, in an era when the quest for sensual pleasure was fraught with fears of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases – especially syphilis”, the museum said.

“Acquiring the condom has enabled us to focus on 19th-century sexuality and prostitution, a subject that is underrepresented in our collection,” it said.

Ms Zelen told the BBC that when she and her colleague first saw the condom at an auction in 2024, they “were laughing”.

“No one else noticed it,” she said, and they were the only ones who bid on it.