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

48. Brekelenkam, Blacksmith's Shop, panel, 1654, 23 5/8 by 32 1/4 in. (60 by 82 cm), London, Christie's, July 4, 1986, lot 10, ill. (not in Lasius). A copy of this painting was formerly in the Schidlowsky Collection, St. Petersburg; sale, Paris (Drouot), May 14, 1908, lot 12, and Brussels, December 19, 1913, lot 132. My thanks to Adriaan Waiboer for this information. For the copy, see Lasius, Quiringh van Brekelenkam, cat. no. D 13.

49. Perhaps for some viewers, the maternal accent in this and other paintings echoed the classical tradition of the visit to the forge of Vulcan by Venus, who often comforts little Amor, frightened (or captivated) by the men's noisy, heavy labor. See, for example, Maarten van Heemskerck, Venus and Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan (1536; Narodni Galerie, Prague), and G. Douffet, Venus in Vulcan's Forge (1615), in Klaus Turk, Bilder der Arbeit: Eine ikonografische Anthologie (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000), 74, fig. 244.

50. The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, ed. R. C. Temple, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1925), 70.

51. On the urgent arguments for building cheap public housing for artisans in many cities, see Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 25-30, who summarize the research on the subject, including the findings of Thera Wijsenbeek-Olthuis. A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 177-80, gives economic evidence of both poor and successful shoemakers.

52. They picture the "presence" rather than the "absent presence," to use Elizabeth A. Honig's apt expression. Honig, "The Space of Gender in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting," in Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, ed. Wayne Franits (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195.

53. See Salomon, "Domesticating the Peasant Father," 97-98; and H. Perry Chapman, "Home and the Display of Privacy," in Westermann, Art and Home, 139-43.

54. Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 47; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), 389; and Wayne Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 97-100.

55. For Jacob Cats's reference to the contrast between "street" and home, see Cats, Alle de Werken (Amsterdam, 1712), vol. 1, 317 (Houwelick, dat is de gansche gelegentheyt des echten staets, first published in 1625).

56. Geoffrey Crossick, "Past Masters: In Search of the Artisan in European History," in The Artisan and the European Town, 1500-1900, ed. Crossick (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). Crossick analyzes the ideal in relation to real-life circumstances of artisans. See also Michael Sonenscher, "Mythical Work: Workshop Production and the Compagnonnages of Eighteenth-Century France," in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 31. In addition, Wayne Franits's comments on the civilizing of the peasant image in the mid-seventeenth century would apply here to urban artisans as well; Franits, "Domesticity, Privacy, Civility, and the Transformation of Adriaen van Ostade's Art," in Images of Women in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Domesticity and the Representation of the Peasant, ed. P. Phagan, exh. cat., Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, 1996, 3-25. On Brekelenkam's paintings of artisans as "odes to Diligence," see de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 170. See also Franits, Dutch Genre Painting, 132.