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

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Ter Borch's experiment with painting a tradesman at work was unique in his oeuvre and exceptional within the genre itself. The Grinder's Family refuses to idealize and reassure. We see a diligent artisan--with just a few scythes to show for his labor. We see a mother and child--but no hint of the comforts of home. We see an unusually informative rendering of process and equipment--but in an environment of dirt, disorder, and decay. Perhaps this problematization of artisan labor explains why Ter Borch's approach to the subject failed to take root within the current artistic repertoire or to shift thematic conventions. Perhaps Ter Borch's painting was too confusing in its odd iconographic juxtapositions, too open-ended in its concept of labor, too ambiguous in the attitudes it conveyed toward work's purpose. Perhaps it took the notion of schilderachtig beyond what audiences found comfortable and attractive. (90)

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Another reason for the picture's lack of resonance beyond Zwolle may have been its reference, however tentative, to a labor-saving mechanism. Despite their vaunted fascination with all things visible, seventeenth-century Dutch artists were in fact highly selective about what they chose to paint. (91) The Dutch economy of the seventeenth century was expanding, experiencing the effects of larger businesses, mass production, more centralization, greater division of labor, and cost-saving machines--including horse mills. Such innovations and technological advances may well have contributed more to the economy than did traditional crafts. (92) Yet the artists of the period virtually ignored these signs of protoindustrialization, and the visual imagery devoted to it was scanty in every medium, but especially in painting. Few images were made, for example, of the Dutch East India shipyards, with their technologically sophisticated windlasses, pulleys, and dry docks, or of the extensive mills in the region of the Zaan River north of Amsterdam.

Clearly, Ter Borch's predecessors and contemporaries, Brekelenkam most especially, succeeded better in fulfilling the expectations of their audience. Pictures that featured earnest family-men artisans and clean-lined shops assured viewers of the well-being of the artisan sector of the economy. This was an art in service to a prosperous domestic ideology: all's well with the social inferiors on whom so much of the viewers' well-being depends. Even Metsu's Interior of a Smithy, for all its idiosyncratic narrative tensions and provocations, affirmed the connections between diligence, productivity, and prosperity, a nonthreatening mixture of traditional and modern associations. With its overtones of history painting, Interior of a Smithy helped construct a contemporary myth of the prosperous artisan, backbone of a prosperous society.

Ter Borch's picture engages the untidy realities of contemporary experience rather than its reassuring myths. Charged with contradictory messages, his Grinder's Family challenges us, and probably challenged its original viewers as well, to ponder something of life's actuality in relation to work. Many of its seventeenth-century viewers could have read the picture in terms of traditional virtues of diligence, effort, skill, and perhaps even virtuous poverty. Despite Ter Borch's insistence on the dignity of labor, regardless of gender, other viewers might have found troubling the picture's references to the dinginess of daily existence and its refusal to incorporate this dinginess into a reaffirming narrative.