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Men at work in Dutch art, or keeping one's nose to the grindstone

Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2007 by Alison M. Kettering

Among the chief delights of leisure is getting away from toil. This is not new. Why would a person at leisure want to look at a person who is working? More particularly, why would a well-to-do and well-educated viewer hang a painting of manual labor on his wall? Why would an artist paint such an image? In early modern Europe, these questions were easily answered: viewers did not seek such images and artists did not paint them.

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Like most generalizations, however, this one had its exceptions. In the early modern period, one European society produced more images of labor than all the others combined. Dutch artists produced--and Dutch buyers purchased--paintings of men engaged in all sorts of skilled labor: straining over a grindstone (Fig. 1), slamming a mallet against hot metal (Fig. 3), bending mind and body to shape a shoe (Fig. 16). Urban artisans dominate these pictures, men whose trades helped form the economic core of the thriving Dutch cities.

This is not the Dutch art celebrated today in novels, films, documentaries, and exhibitions, nor in textbooks and other sorts of academic writing. We have come to associate seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting with scenes of refined domestic contentment, intimate social behavior, and quiet prosperity, usually as defined by women. In the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu, and many others, sweeping done by a maid is often the most energetic physical work to be seen. When men are included in these urban domestic scenes, they typically engage in games of chance, rituals of courtship, or pursuits requiring mental rather than bodily exertion. Even in peasant pictures, another important thematic category for the Dutch, the men more frequently carouse than shoulder the heavy tasks that actually filled their days.

Paintings of urban artisans plying their trades are thus outliers in two significant senses: they focus on productive work rather than on leisure, and they are set in an urban environment that is decidedly masculine rather than feminine. (1) Scholars have written relatively little about these images, in part because their subject matter occurs outside the usual repertoire. In the past, when such works were discussed at all, they were typically viewed as straightforward depictions of ordinary folk of humble means. (2) Because of the often extraordinary mimetic persuasiveness of these paintings, they were assumed to have had a documentary function, recording the tools and methods of the age. Yet most recent studies argue, not surprisingly, that these images, like other early modern genre representations, followed their own visual and ideological imperatives, interpreting even as they described. (3) Understood as artistic formulations rather than factual documents, they reveal more about the concerns of artists and audiences than about the literal appearance of specific seventeenth-century streets and shops.

These depictions raise historical questions about the challenges that early modern socioeconomic forces, including protoindustrialization, presented to age-old ideas of labor. They also raise cultural questions about how notions of "home," "work," "masculine," and "feminine" intersected. While some of these imagined workplaces exclude women and any hint of domesticity, others oddly evoke the same quiet and comfort that contemporary pictures of a female-centered environment so effectively convey. (4)

The most complex of these representations of manual labor present not a single view of work and of workers but multiple views and explore a range of overlapping issues. Quiringh van Brekelenkam's paintings of workshop interiors (Figs. 16-18, among many others), produced from 1653 to 1661, constitute the most numerous subset of this genre. (5) Typically, they catalog the skills and materials of the well-kept workplace. The head of the shop, usually an experienced older craftsman, is positioned in the center of the space, often accompanied by apprentices. The master's wife sometimes appears as well, but off to the side. Brekelenkam's paintings show their largely middle-class viewers how artisan and shop ought to be seen. More open-ended are two ambitious paintings on relatively large canvases by his better-known contemporaries Gerard ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu.

Ter Borch's The Grinder's Family, about 1653-54 (Figs. 1, 2), depicts a man sharpening a scythe on a sizable grindstone. (6) He stretches his body along a cloth-covered plank in a position that gives him maximum control. His tense, muscular arms hold the blade against the turning stone, which rests in a trench, its axle level with the ground. Water used to cool the process can be seen splashing up against the backboard. The power source for the operation, an apparatus driven by a horse or mule, is barely visible in the darkness of the shed at the rear. Near the grinder stands another workman, outfitted with a cap and a smith's apron. Scythe blades rest on the bare ground in front of the grindstone. In the foreground, a woman sits attending a child. Run-down buildings surround the figures, while a well-maintained building constructed of costly materials can be seen in the background.

Men at work in Dutch art, or keeping one's nose to the grindstone

Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2007 by Alison M. Kettering

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