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

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.

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.

Metsu's Interior of a Smithy, of about 1657 (Fig. 3), incorporates this contrast of wealth and status into its narrative. (7) Here a self-assured, elderly master workman, accompanied by an apprentice boy, operates inside his shop. His client is no fellow artisan but a supercilious member of the leisured class, who has brought his horse in for shoeing. The contest of competing wills is played out in a dark, dramatically lit shop, which, unlike the shabby, ramshackle work yard of Ter Borch's grinder, is fully outfitted and furnished with a bank of colorful stained-glass windows.

Such nuanced representations of manual labor must have prompted close, extended looking and engaged their audience in conversation about a variety of ideas, some of them problematic, about class and gender in relation to occupation. Whether innovative or derivative, conservative or progressive (or a combination thereof), these paintings show artists grappling with how best to visualize men at work--what to imagine, what to record or to leave out, what, in fact, to consider picture-worthy. More often than not, we find that "picture-worthiness" corresponded to the urban audience's notion of its own society as ordered, civilized, and prosperous.

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Let me acknowledge that the historical and cultural contexts that I discuss here are necessarily less discovered than constructed. They reflect our modern-day understanding of work as a sociocultural rather than merely economic activity, and they assume class and gender to be central categories of analysis. "Class"--a concept developed in the nineteenth century--will be understood here in its early modern sense as rank or, in Dutch, stand, with a focus on those rungs of society that included artisans and craftsmen, men who identified with their individual occupation or calling rather than exhibiting a "working-class consciousness."

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As for gender, nothing separates the objects of this study more obviously from the majority of Dutch genre paintings than their focus on male figures in a largely masculine working environment. In recent decades, with the rise of feminism, a number of scholars have written about working women and the ways they were pictured in the early modern Netherlands. (8) "Masculinity," by contrast, has just begun to surface as a topic for study. (9) The images here of working men--pictured as husbands as well as producers--allow us entry into some of the ways that Dutch culture implicitly understood "maleness."

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Poems and Prints about Work

For some today, nineteenth-century images of labor are better known than their seventeenth-century predecessors. Ford Madox Brown's mural-sized Work of 1852-65 (Fig. 4) comes immediately to mind. This and related paintings have recently occasioned a good deal of discussion about art that pictures labor in nineteenth-century Europe. (10) A plethora of texts, among them narratives by the artists, including Madox Brown himself and later Vincent van Gogh, and writings by such social critics as Thomas Carlyle, the foremost articulator of the Victorian "Gospel of Work," allow historians to reconstruct the interpretative field for this kind of art with some confidence. Although no Carlyle exists for earlier periods, it is still possible for us to discern the outlines of the early modern European discourse of work, a discourse rife with competing positions.

The traditional early modern view, a legacy of ancient and medieval Christian thinking, understood manual occupation as inferior to intellectual activity." (11) In this conservative view, any work involving the physical body was considered degrading, a punishment for humans' original disobedience in Eden, and thus a mark of their fallen nature. Nevertheless, the Bible commanded people to work. Moreover, work protected the industrious against the vice of sloth, considered one of the deadliest of sins. Work also served an important moral purpose. One would work in order to live a virtuous life, to serve God, even to gain salvation. But gradually during the early modern period, a more worldly, secular, and civic appreciation of work began to develop. Attitudes drew closer to our present-day thinking, which connects work with productivity, social advancement, esteem, and wealth. This new set of attitudes emphasized the link between diligence and personal prosperity as a desirable end both for the individual and for society. (12) Physical work that paid well came to be seen as inherently valuable. For a good long time the traditional religious view, stressing work's essential virtue and moral purpose, coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with this more modern view, highlighting the contribution of work to individual and socioeconomic prosperity.

In the Dutch Republic, Johan van Nyenborgh's Tooneel der Ambachten of Den Winckel der Handtwercken en Konsten (Theater of Trades or the Showcase of Handcrafts and Arts), published in Groningen in 1659, is useful for understanding this paradoxical mixture of ideas. (13) Van Nyenborgh (1621-1670) is best described as a moralizing poet in the vein of Jacob Cats, whose writings he most decidedly had read, as he had those of Cats's collaborator the artist-poet Adriaen van de Venne. (14) In no apparent order, the Tooneel der Ambachten catalogs dozens of "handicrafts" and (mechanical) "arts," furnishing each with short poems that reveal current attitudes about the urban trades. The progressive elements in the book are many, beginning with the act of devoting an entire book to the laudable productivity of artisanal labor. Van Nyenborgh praises the artisan for the industriousness that allows him to provide well for his family and even to become rich. In a more traditional stance, he lauds work as a protection against sloth, links poverty with idleness, inveighs against intemperate striving for financial gain (even while approving the artisan's ability to produce wealth), and piously gives thanks to God for maintaining the social order. (15) In the end, van Nyenborgh endorses the notion of work as an element of social control, valid certainly for those of a class lower than his own, but ultimately for the entire society. It is worth adding that nowhere in the book does he mention women's work, for he, along with his audience, tacitly assumed the identification of labor with masculinity.

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For reconstructing the early modern discourse of work, we find few written sources as concentrated in their focus as van Nyenborgh's book. Most Dutch textual information must be sought in markedly heterogeneous places, including the odd aphorism, poem, emblem, or inscription. (16) The oeuvre of the earlier writer-illustrator Adriaen van de Venne presents some prime examples. Van de Venne's 1635 book-length poem Tafereel van de Belacchende Wereld (Tableau of the Laughable World) includes an aphorism that nicely encapsulates one aspect of the traditional view--the protection labor offers against the vice of sloth and the intrinsically moral rather than economic purpose of work: "It's still better to work in vain than to lose oneself in idleness." (17) Van de Venne's interest in the trades was more fully expressed in his "Sinnighe Slijpers Liedt" (roughly translated, Wise or Sensible Grinder's Song, 1623) (Fig. 5), the first of a set of occasional poems dedicated to his fellow artist Magdalena van de Passe, which yields further indications about the normative conception of work for the Dutch. (18) His title print features a portable grinding machine run by an itinerant grinder clearly lower in status than Ter Borch's tradesman grinder (Fig. 1) or even the apprentice boy employed in Metsu's smithy (Fig. 3). Still, van de Venne's protagonist is a cheerful fellow who furnishes services to every occupation and rank, many of them named. Representatives of these stations, from blacksmiths and tailors to the ladies and gentlemen with whom van de Passe would have identified, wait their turn in a deliberately ordered semicircle. (19) Delivering a sort of paradoxical encomium to his trade and status, the "Sinnighe Slijpers Liedt" gives the upper hand to the lowly grinder, despite--or, rather, because of-his outsider, itinerant status. (20) Although it contains none of the explicit moralizing and conventional piety of van Nyenborgh's Tooneel, van de Venne's poem makes readers reflect on the ideal components of artisanal labor: honesty, honor, and effort, ideals with validity for the whole society. One of the values of the poem for us lies in the implications of its list of occupational titles. Like van Nyenborgh, van de Venne has fabricated a unified social order, a veritable theater of occupations, each easily labeled and widely understood in terms of its economic function and corporate identity.

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Decades before the publications of van Nyenborgh and van de Venne, printed books had appeared illustrating the traditional trades. Their images had roots deep in history, extending as far back as antiquity and revived in the later Middle Ages. Late medieval representations of artisans abounded, in sculpted reliefs, stained glass, and manuscript illumination. Almost always organized into cycles, such as the Labors of the Months, these medieval images accentuated the relation of the worldly social order to a divinely ordered cosmos. (21) With the invention of woodcut and engraving in the fifteenth century, artisanal images could reach far beyond the cathedral or the local nobleman's library. By the mid-sixteenth century, trade books established a rhetoric about work--visual, socioeconomic, and moral--that fixed itself firmly in the European imagination.

Deservedly the best known of the books of trade was the German poet Hans Sachs's Standebuch, the popular name for Eygentliche Beschreibung Aller Stande auff Erden (Exact Description of All Ranks on Earth) (Frankfurt, 1568), which was illustrated with 114 woodcuts by the Swiss printmaker Jost Amman (Figs. 6, 7). (22) Arranged according to the "natural" hierarchy of humans in society (hence the reference to ranks, or Stande, in its title), the book begins with trades dependent on mental rather than physical effort. Thereafter, artisanal handiwork is given special emphasis. (23) And Amman constructs these trades in overwhelmingly masculine terms.

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Although the Standebuch was designed to satisfy a public eager for encyclopedic knowledge, it also articulated a model of moral behavior. The texts of Hans Sachs enunciate this model explicitly: be industrious, run your businesses in an honest manner, employ the highest standards of craftsmanship, cooperate with one another, resist the vices of idleness and greed, and devote your labor to God rather than to the acquisition of riches for personal gain (this last, especially, a carryover from late medieval thinking). For his part, Amman renders each scene as preternaturally tidy and functional, with interiors enhanced by straight walls punctured by leaded-glass windows or by crisply cut masonry arches that sometimes double as display windows. He shows the grinder (Fig. 6) operating a foot-powered machine just outside his shop, with his tools arrayed neatly on the smooth, clean wall behind him. The scythe maker (Fig. 7) works inside a well-organized, specialist smithy; his products hang neatly on a rod. Order prevails, signaling the artisan's comfortable place in the social scheme and the support of such organizational structures as the guild system, with its guarantee of artisanal contribution to socioeconomic stability.

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The Standebuch was likely known in the Dutch Republic, both in its original form and through simplified copies published for cheap and widespread distribution. (24) The first of the seventeenth-century Dutch crafts and trades series, Jan Joris van Vliet's 1635 set of eighteen large, vigorously etched prints, however, bears little visual resemblance to Amman's work. Van Vliet's images are robust rather than staid, and there is no accompanying text. (25) In his Weaver (Fig. 8), sharp contrasts of dark and light produce an activated space in which master and apprentice compete with the hulking loom for attention. His Blacksmith (Fig. 9) shows an environment even richer in chiaroscuro effects, anticipating the dramatic lighting of Metsu's smithy (Fig. 3). By contrast with Amman, van Vliet focuses on the gritty actions of his peasantlike figures rather than on laying out the typology of their trade. If these laborers attain moral righteousness, it is through the intensity of their engagement with their craft.

Over a hundred years later, the Dutch artist Jan Luyken followed Sachs and Amman's precedent much more closely with his own book of trades, Het Menselijk Bedrijf (The Human Trades) (Amsterdam, 1694) (Figs. 10, 11). (26) Luyken used a comparable visual structure and reinforced his images with moralizing textual commentary. Even his dark blacksmith's shop (Fig. 10) is cleansed of the dirt and chaos necessary for an actual smithy to function. Like those of Amman and Sachs, Luyken's images and texts create an idealized, orderly, and traditional artisan's world, which perpetuated the age-old Christian notion of manual labor in relation to the divine scheme of things. (27)

It is hardly surprising that publishers of broadsheets found the trades and occupations to be compelling subjects for initiating a wide viewership--including children--into the complex world of work. Some of the later anonymous sheets referred to Luyken's book of trades, simplifying his images into prints that were more descriptive than moralizing. (28) Another broadsheet maker copied Jan Joris van Vliet's single-leaf prints, grouping fifteen onto a single sheet and adding sixty lines of verse that repeated the (by now) conventional conviction of the socioeconomic necessity of the trades (Fig. 12). (29) Another made a slightly different selection from the most basic occupations, each personified by a single workman with appropriate actions and attributes (Fig. 13). (30) This simple imagery offered a shorthand for the complicated operations of the artisanal trades. Though few of these cheap, throwaway sheets survive, in the seventeenth century they were published and circulated in huge numbers. One historian has called such broadsides the "mass media" of their age. (31)

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An itinerant salesman or hawker, such as Adriaen van de Venne's grinder (Fig. 5), finds little place in books and series that centered on professional artisans situated comfortably within the established ranks of society. Yet hawkers dominate an important type of broadsheet that flourished throughout Western Europe at this time. They are known usually as "Cries" sheets, for the sounds made in calling out goods for sale. (32) The omnipresence of these sheets in the visual culture must have prompted Dutch tile makers to produce Cries series of their own, applying this imagery of lowly itinerants to the very walls of middle-class homes. (33)

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By midcentury Cries sheets had developed a fairly canonical repertoire, with the grinder appearing frequently. But unlike other itinerants, the grinder carries a machine: a treadle-operated grindstone fastened to a wheelbarrow and outfitted with a container for water to reduce the friction between implement and stone. (34) Similar to van de Venne (Fig. 5), Adriaen van Ostade played off the Cries genre in his Knife Grinder of about 1653-60 (Fig. 14). He gives us a lively illustration of the contrast between two types of artisan. (35) A cobbler plies his trade out of a crude, low shed that at least provides a roof over his head. By contrast, the grinder's bent posture, rough clothes, and slouched hat emphasize his outsider status. The cobbler, though poor, is a townsman, neighbor to the townsfolk at the rear and the couple at the prosperous house behind. The grinder will soon be on his way.

Whatever their format, these prints established a visual schematization of urban work. They typically imaged the occupations in grids, with each figure isolated and differentiated from the others. Significantly, almost all the figures were combined in cycles or on multi-image sheets. Such a presentation joined individual occupations into a larger collective, erasing differences of status among them. (36) By structuring a taxonomy of artisans on the one hand and a taxonomy of hawkers on the other, they helped to shape a "theater of knowledge" about both groups. A similar impulse informed contemporary texts that detailed a litany of moral defects associated with each trade. (37) Like van de Venne's "Wise Grinder's Song" with its listlike enumeration of occupations, these texts echoed the taxonomies typical of the print tradition. The prints and texts thus fixed a way of seeing and understanding that stressed how individual occupations fit into the harmonious and stable collective.

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In the process of codifying popular notions of tradesmen, the prints also constructed a vivid imagery of masculinity. Regardless of format, they nearly always showed work and workshop in masculine terms. In doing so, the prints "naturalized" ordinary, productive artisanal labor as predominantly male.

Paintings about Work

Given the ubiquity of prints dealing with craftsmen at work, it was all but inevitable that seventeenth-century Dutch painters would address the topic. The transformation from ink to oil brought with it both a more complicated idealization of the worker and a preference for skilled work. (38) Skilled workers required specific locations, settled spaces for manufacturing as well as selling, which oil painting was particularly well suited to describe. In turn, the descriptive capabilities of oil painting may have contributed to a shift in imagery. Although etching and engraving have the potential for detailed background description, none of the prints examined here (with the exception of Ostade's etching, Fig. 14) establishes such a full sense of place. The very different uses to which paintings were put encouraged other changes. Whereas broadsides were treated casually, and high-end prints were usually destined for an album or book, a genre painting was generally meant to be displayed on the walls of a middle- or upper-middle-class home. Simply placing the image of a tradesman on an owner's wall implied an affirmation of the trade depicted and an engagement in public discussion about what labor means for society.

All of the artisanal occupations chosen for painting were based in guilds (a claim that cannot be made for depictions of work in prints). Cobblers, for example, belonged to the Saint Crispinus guild and metalworkers to the Saint Eligius guild. Long important in the Netherlands, guilds continued strong, particularly in the middle years of the seventeenth century, which was roughly the same period that the paintings were produced. They involved a large percentage of the population in most towns of the republic and formed an essential component of Dutch commercial capitalism. Designed to protect employment, regulate labor conditions, and provide insurance, guilds played an important role in establishing socioeconomic order. (39) A painting of an artisan on a burgher's wall, therefore, would have been read not merely as "cobbler" or "blacksmith" but as signifier of the guild to which the artisan belonged, and thus as signifier of the artisan's formal, collective identity.

Sophisticated Dutch artists and critics, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, were probably aware of the antique precedents for these artisan paintings. (40) Pliny recounts that the Greek painter Peiraikos had developed the low and presumably comic genre of "barbers' and cobblers' shops." (41) Although the category had drawn criticism from those who termed the paintings "mere trifles"--anticipating the debates in early modern Italy and France over hierarchies of subject matter--fame and high prices were Peiraikos's rewards. Even though debates about the quotidian as a worthy subject for painting rarely engaged commentators in the Dutch Republic, the antique precedent did give painting about everyday labor an additional, historical justification all its own. (42) Similarly, a knowledge of the ancient subjects may have contributed to reflection on the appropriateness of one type of artisan representation over another, as part of the larger conversation about the schilderachtig, or "picture-worthy."

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Trades paintings began appearing in the Netherlands during the late 1640s and 1650s, created by such artists as the Haarlem painters Cornelis Beelt and Cornelis Dekker and the Leiden painters Johannes van Oudenrogge and Quiringh van Brekelenkam. (43) The Haarlem painters produced numerous pictures of weavers, along with other craftsmen (for example, smiths, Fig. 15). The Leiden artist Brekelenkam devoted a significant portion of his output to artisans in their shops.

Brekelenkam

Whether painting a tailor, a cobbler, a kettle maker, or a blacksmith, Brekelenkam fashioned a single formula for their depiction (Figs. 16-18). (44) All of his panels are oblong in shape, clear in their construction of space, static in composition, muted in palette, and illuminated gently from the left. The lines of the work spaces are relatively clean; the walls are more or less smooth, with only occasional signs of wear and tear; and the workaday mess is present but under control. Tools hang prominently on the walls and lie in logical sequence on the tables, shelves, and floors. The shops are open to the street and therefore to public scrutiny. Shop owners frequently engage in commercial transactions. Clients of both sexes often peer from the outside through a window. Housewives or their maids negotiate inside. The presence of these customers indicates the larger community that the artisan is both dependent on and responsible to. The easy nature of their relationship suggests both client satisfaction with the work and satisfactory remuneration for the workman.

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Brekelenkam's paintings appear to derive from the artisan print tradition. Certainly they exhibit compositional and iconographic parallels in their boxlike spaces and in the easily recognizable visual distinctions they make among occupations. Although the paintings were hung singly rather than in series, it is quite possible that savvy beholders saw them within the visual and literary tradition of the trades series. If so, then the print model would have supplied an enlarged social context for these individual paintings, conditioning viewers to connect a single shop with the larger whole, to see each single artisan in relation to the entire stratum of artisans.

These paintings differ from trades prints in a number of significant ways. For a start, they show nuances of status among the tradesmen. In several of Brekelenkam's representations of tailors' shops (Fig. 17), for example, a fancy chair on a platform awaits the customer. Pewter plates sit on the mantelpiece and a framed still life or landscape adorns the wall, material objects signifying the shop owner's prosperity. In his kettle smith and shoemaker shops, by contrast, environmental detail is restricted to more basic amenities, indicating the somewhat lower socioeconomic status of these occupations. (45) (Though paintings may be absent from a cobbler's walls, some decoration does appear--such as a cheap paper map with a corner curled up.)

More important, these artisan paintings differ from the prints in their gender and familial construction. The overwhelmingly masculine milieu of the trades prints is replaced by family members within the work environment. Brekelenkam's women crouch or sit to the side, engaging in some occupation coded as appropriately feminine (Figs. 16, 17). When the workman is old, so is his wife; when he is not, she is a mother. Whatever the woman's age, her form is inevitably placed lower on the picture plane than her husband's, and her body closes in on itself. The master dominates (often aided by apprentices and employees--all of them male, of course). The woman's presence assures the viewer that the operation is family-run, that the artisan is a paterfamilias, and that he, due to his age and experience, is both respectable and trustworthy. (46) Age, in fact, never becomes an occasion for caricature. Quite the contrary: Brekelenkam presents all of his artisans as disciplined and skillful.

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Women appear even in the relatively inhospitable environment of a smithy, as seen in renderings by Beelt and van Oudenrogge (Figs. 15, 19). (47) In Brekelenkam's The Blacksmith's Shop (Fig. 18), the woman is a client rather than a family member. Charged with running her middle-class household, she counts out money, while her husband and child merely watch. The husband's clothing and languid smoking differentiate him from the elderly artisan, with his rough clothes, his worker's cap (incongruously white), and his calm focus on the labor at hand. (48) The juxtaposition of artisan and clients signals a mutually beneficial relationship. He is responsive to the members of his community, and they in turn stand eager to compensate him for his work. (49)

It must be noted that Brekelenkam's smithy, like his other workshops (including that of the kettle maker), is characteristically spacious and even orderly, with noise and dirt kept to a minimum. In this regard it supports the rosy account by the English traveler Peter Mundy. Visiting Holland in 1640, he celebrated Dutch workshops as "Fairely sett Forth" and "not much inferior" to the houses of those higher on the social scale. (50) Certainly success of this sort was possible, for archival records indicate that many artisans lived and worked in structures that divided space functionally: the front room, with the best light and street access, was designated for production and commercial transactions; the back room, for domestic activities. The historical record also reveals, though, that the more typical artisan or shopkeeper lived and worked in cramped quarters. (51) Many artisans even plied their trades out of rented sheds of the sort pictured by Ostade (Fig. 14).

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As a group, these trades paintings offer a corrective to the notion that Dutch visual art excluded images of productive masculine labor. (52) Brekelenkam's interiors contrast sharply with "normative" Dutch genre works that depicted a more affluent segment of society, at home and at leisure, and that focused on women. Despite the importance of the idea of family for national self-definition, representation of the entire family was rare; husbands scarcely ever appear in Pieter de Hooch's images, and never in Vermeer's. (53) Perhaps the situation is more complicated than this polarization of workshop and domestic interior implies. Brekelenkam and the others were able to put husbands back into the picture by merging two traditions: the trades prints, which had long been defined in masculine terms; and the new domestic interiors, which were femininely defined. These artisan husbands were hardly well-to-do householders, but workingmen. These interiors were not affluent living quarters, but workshops.

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Yet many of these imaginary pictorial workshops resemble the prosperous domestic interiors both in their orderliness and in their visual rhetoric. Brekelenkam's pictures, especially, overlay workshop with home (Figs. 16, 17). It is their ideological charge, in addition to their class emphasis, that differs. The upper-middle-class domestic paintings show a refuge, a place of safety separate from the sphere of commerce. (54) By contrast, the trades paintings celebrate that very sphere. (55) Through the neat trick of imagining the commercial world in terms of the refuge, they create an ideal of mythic contours: the roomy, light-filled, independent workshop, with master, employees, and family members harmoniously producing goods for a satisfied, local clientele. (56) Artisans or their wives occasionally stare out at the viewer, as if welcoming us to their shops, as if willing to serve. The original affluent viewers of these paintings, while presumably identifying with the customers rather than with the workers, would surely have taken comfort in the myth. For many viewers, that notion of prosperity might well have extended to the entire artisan sector, to the guild structure that supported it, perhaps even to the city and the republic.

"Picturesque," in the sense of "picture-worthy," is a rough translation of schilderachtig, a broad term in use in the seventeenth century to cover the rustic, the old-fashioned, or just the prosaic (among other things). (57) Brekelenkam's shops must have appeared schilderachtig in their worn yet comfortable ordinariness and their open sociability. For viewers fascinated with the "lower," or those seeking confirmation of what they imagined to be the stable, honest underpinnings of their society, these paintings may have been understood as the urban equivalent of peasant pictures, at least the more civilized versions of this genre from the second half of the century. (58) Like the best of the peasant painters, Adriaen van Ostade, Brekelenkam understood the limits of the picturesque and accentuated the positive in his painted workshops. The fictions he constructed affirmed traditional links of work with moral purpose, on the one hand, and with the "modern," well-regulated, stable, and prosperous socioeconomic order, on the other. This was fiction that fused old and new ideas of work.

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In fact, not all owners of paintings were affluent. To the astonishment of the English traveler Peter Mundy, even the shops and stalls of Dutch butchers, bakers, blacksmiths, and cobblers were adorned with a picture or two--a statement that art historians have seized on to argue the unusually widespread collecting of art in the Dutch Republic. (59) Archival research has so far been equivocal about the accuracy of Mundy's claim. Brekelenkam's pictures likely sold for much less than those of Metsu and Ter Borch, and replicas of his works might have been cheap enough to allow a modestly successful artisan, say a tailor, to decorate his shop with an idealization of his trade. (60)

Metsu's Interior of a Smithy

In contrast to the blending of genres observed in Brekelenkam's oeuvre, Metsu's Interior of a Smithy (Fig. 3) shares little with his own domestic interiors. The painting is an isolated phenomenon within his oeuvre or, rather, it is the most developed of a small number of renderings of smiths. One of these (though its attribution is insecure) tells the mythological tale of Venus's visit to Vulcan's forge. (61) Another takes a more descriptive approach, depicting a close-up view of a dark and messy armorer's shop in which an apprentice aids the master in synchronized collaboration. (62) None of Metsu's smith paintings bears more than a general visual similarity to those by the Haarlem painter Cornelis Beelt (Fig. 15) or by the Leiden painters Brekelenkam and Oudenrogge (Figs. 18, 19). But the latter two may have stimulated Metsu, their fellow Leidenaar, to explore the subject.

If Adriaen van de Venne had written about smiths as he did about grinders, he might well have listed all the trades dependent on that occupation and differentiated between the grofsmid, who manufactured heavy, large objects, and the kleinsmid, who made smaller items, including horseshoes. (63) Whatever their specialty, all metalworkers belonged to the same guild. In Amsterdam, guild records list locksmiths, coppersmiths, knife makers, armorers, pewterers, and rudder makers, in addition to all-purpose smiths. (64) The guild in Ter Borch's much smaller hometown of Zwolle included the specialty of scythe maker. (65)

Probably executed shortly after he moved to Amsterdam about 1655, Metsu's Interior of a Smithy, like Brekelenkam's Blacksmith's Shop (Fig. 18), shows a debt to the print tradition. This is most evident in its composition: the boxlike space, the glimpse of the outside world, the silhouetting of the smith's gestures against the forge, and the relative orderliness of the shop. Dark lighting surrounding a glowing fire is another feature common to many renderings of forges. (66) Such effects in the prints must be called muted, however, when compared with the powerful chiaroscuro devised by Metsu to dramatize this smithy.

Just enough light seeps in from outside to reveal the shop's rich assortment of tools, some of them hanging neatly on the walls, others forming still lifes that frame the steep perspective of the space. A small hand-powered grinding stone rests in a casement at the front of the forge (the glow of its fire can be seen behind the smith's hip). Because this kleinsmid functions as a farrier, his equipment includes a frame to restrain the horse at the threshold. (67) Its braces contribute to the geometry of the open side of the shop. Metsu's description of the apparatus, including the chains and pulleys that fill the shop's back spaces, bears witness to his fascination with their practical significance, even as he organizes them into metaphors for rational, controlled activity. As in the artisan prints and in Brekelenkam's paintings, the array of tools, each fitted into its own place, affirms the organizational logic of the craftsman's work. Process complements product.

Rather than just describing the work of fashioning metal, Metsu turns it into theater. The horseshoe on the anvil glows a brilliant cherry red (to use smiths' terminology) in the sooty black interior. Metsu dramatizes the charged exchange between the hardworking artisan and the overbearing client. Even the horse participates in this narrative as it attempts to break free of the restraint-frame, its impetuosity contrasting with the relative order and rule that prevail inside the shop. The smith fixes his gaze on the animal's eyes as if preparing for combat; his scrutiny suggests the mental calculation as well as the physical skill necessary for the job. He bends to his task, clad in a white, slightly soiled, open shirt, with a leather apron wrapped around his trousers. His client, by contrast, stands upright, his height enhanced by the upturned brim of his hat, his status underscored by a sword and walking stick, and his importance further emphasized by the expanse of bright red that colors his long riding coat. The smith's red cap is no match, and it likely hides thinning hair. This smith is gnarled and middle-aged, reminding us of some of Brekelenkam's craftsmen, at least in his maturity (Figs. 16-18). The smith's form, posture, and possible lameness undercut the longtime characterization of smiths as the quintessence of mature masculine strength. "[S]mits syn die mens die hebben manne crachten" (smiths are men who have manly strength) declares the inscription on the broadsheet copying van Vliet's artisans (Fig. 12). As we will see, though, there are many ways for a man to be strong.

Metsu's Interior of a Smithy differs from the traditionally static artisan image even more significantly than I have suggested. The artist's early involvement with history themes is pertinent, for this picture rivals history painting in its development of the narrative potential of the encounter. (68) The subject of a meeting in a smithy calls to mind classical stories of visits to Vulcan's forge by Venus or Minerva or Thetis or Apollo. The somewhat misshapen body of Metsu's smith echoes Vulcan's lameness. Legends about Saint Eligius, patron saint of the metalsmith guilds, provided another dramatic encounter in a smithy. After cutting off the foreleg of a devil-possessed horse to make shoeing easier, Saint Eligius managed to restore the foreleg and to exorcize the devil at the same time. The image of the saint hammering a shoe next to a maimed horse was well known in the early modern period. (69) The restraint of the unbridled horse recalls, too, the hardy tradition of horse-taming imagery. Originating with Plato and surviving well into the early modern period, this metaphor signified order and civilization. (70)

The shop itself presents a further layer of association. Its stained-glass windows signal the artisan's comfortable economic position, improbably fancy though they appear for an actual blacksmith shop. (71) They remind us of Brekelenkam's selective use of upscale accoutrements: wall paintings and posh chairs for customers to enjoy (Fig. 17). Painted in colors and silver stain, the windows direct our attention to the cavalier. Rather than leading to a busy town street, they look onto the outlying fields into which he will soon ride.

The painting dramatizes the social gulf between the men who ride horses and the men who shoe them. Yet Metsu's painting does not appear to take sides. By positioning the smith directly opposite and nearly level with his client, Metsu affirms the artisan's authority and independence, leaving him the "master" within his domain. Years of work have honed his talents, which remain undiminished with the passage of time. Though he is ordinary, old, angular, and wiry, he also conveys assertiveness and experience, valued characteristics for the skilled modern workman. Indeed, the painting's very refusal to compel identification with the client over the artisan might have proven difficult for some viewers. The smith becomes the approximate psychological equal of the client, a near equivalency likely to make certain members of the elite uneasy. Similarly moved, Pieter de la Court, a distinguished political writer, used the word "discomfort" to describe his reaction to uppity urban craftsmen in 1662. (72)

Ultimately, despite its potential class provocations, its history painting overtones, and its narrative complications, the picture all in all constructs a reassuring image. This smith embodies the diligence of the master craftsman. His labor is productive, and society deems his products essential.

Ter Borch's The Grinder's Family

Datable to the time of his move from Zwolle to Deventer, about 1653-54, Ter Borch's Grinder's Family (Figs. 1, 2) was executed in a period of experimentation before the artist settled on the genre that made his name. The painting differs enormously from his later high-life domestic interiors, and not in subject matter alone. The figures here are less psychologically complex; their interaction is almost without nuance. Although the surface of the mother's face is sensitively detailed, the men's faces are minimally described and hardly expressive. The artist has instead devoted his attention to architectural detail, which is strikingly richer here than elsewhere in his oeuvre. Nevertheless, in its narrative ambiguities, in its refusal to nail down unequivocal meaning, this painting remains wholly consistent with Ter Borch's characteristic approach.

While unconventional in many ways, the work shows clear affinities with the trades and crafts tradition. (73) As in many of the Haarlem and Leiden paintings, the insertion of a woman and child (judging from her age, the grinder's wife and their offspring) intimates a small, family-run operation, which constituted an ideal for many artisans at the time. A master artisan works out of his home, with his family close by. The plain-featured wife searches for lice in the child's mop of hair, a topos of mother love and diligence commonly pictured at the time. (74) Like Brekelenkam (Figs. 16, 17), Ter Borch reinforces the marked separation between women's and men's work that had developed in the early modern period, (75) but he gives the woman and child more prominence. In addition, he differentiates male and female activities even more obviously. The seated woman's gentle search through her child's hair contrasts with the grinder's physically demanding labor. Her job requires a nurturing and patient disposition. His requires occupational training, intense concentration, and bodily strength--note the focused lighting on his muscular arms. In another departure, the setting here bears little resemblance to the homey workshops of Brekelenkam, with their echoes of more prosperous domestic environments. The artisan's wife here may be cleaning a child's head, but she sits amid dirt and debris. Nor does Ter Borch clarify what "home" consisted of for her: no part of the yard suggests the family's dwelling, certainly not the crumbling masonry wall with its broken windows and black hole of a door.

The masculine nature of this domain is reinforced by the addition of the second male. He shares little with the usual image of the client (except youth relative to the master, as in Metsu's Interior of a Smithy, Fig. 3). His clothing marks him as a fellow artisan. The cloth at his hip signifies his readiness to help with the finished product. Perhaps he is a scythe maker. (76) In any case, his upright posture and tall, well-formed body confer dignity on his status as artisan. In no way a representation of sloth, he is at rest only momentarily, fully attentive to the work at hand, and seemingly oblivious to the operation's noise.

Pictorially, Ter Borch ties the manual labor at the back of the painting to the feminine presence at the front by an expanse of walls, capped by a long roofline. Iconographically, Ter Borch ties the disparate compositional parts together by the motif of looking. This looking in turn strengthens the theme of diligence. The grinder directs his gaze to his blade; the mother inspects her child's hair; the wary cat stares out at the viewer. Most important, the fellow artisan watches the grinder practice his craft. Positioned in the center of the composition, this standing figure also shows the viewer how and where to look.

Quite possibly the grinder's position deep within the space can be related to Ter Borch's highly exceptional decision to depict an animal-driven mechanism for turning the stone. No other artistic rendering of a grinder, in any medium, includes such a mechanism. Nearly all images depict the portable stone that was usually, though not always, operated by itinerants (Figs. 5, 6, 13, 14) or the small, encased, hand-cranked stone (Figs. 3, 15). (77) One finds representations of horse mills for metal grinding only in foreign books illustrating innovative engineering, such as that by G. A. Bockler (1661; Fig. 20). This was an altogether separate kind of imagery, operating with a very different visual and cultural logic, and destined for a library rather than a wall. (78)

Ter Borch must have taken his cue from observing an actual horse- or mule-operated mill or, more likely, from observing parts of various mechanisms and making a composite. Like many seventeenth-century towns, Zwolle had at least one slypmolen, a grinding mill presumably powered by a horse. (79) We know more about one in Deventer, where Ter Borch moved just around this time. Many years earlier, an oil mill had been installed in one of the medieval defense towers, once they had lost their military function. In 1648 the Deventer smiths took this over for their grinding operations. (80) Ter Borch must also have seen horse-powered grain mills like the one in Jan Luyken's print in Het Menselijk Bedrijf (Fig. 11), whose mechanism is depicted quite clearly. He would have seen animals used for various dredging machines as well. (81)

Ter Borch leaves the mill's details sketchy. He clarifies neither how the wheel powers the grindstone nor how the train of gears works. Nor does he indicate how this modest shed could actually accommodate the wide turning radius of the animal. At the very least, the presence of the huge mechanism would seem to identify the workman at the stone as a professional grinder. Overall, though, Ter Borch's motives are puzzling. He pictures a labor-saving device employing a fairly complicated mechanism, but he places it in semidarkness and shoves the whole operation to the rear.

By contrast, the cool, bright light that illuminates the main scene reveals a multitude of surfaces, most of them rough or in poor repair. Even the tall structure at the far left, a barely comprehensible array of verticals and diagonals, contributes to the effect of "real life," an effect further enhanced by the cropping that implies a continuation of disrepair beyond what can be seen. (82) Such details endow this shop with a strong sense of place. Along with the unusual presence of the horse mill, they strengthen the viewer's impression that at least parts of the scene were observed from life. (83)

In the distance can be seen a well-maintained, relatively complete, but old building that presents a striking foil to the foreground. Its front gable is decorated with pinnacles and turrets and its roof constructed of slate, a material used primarily for costly, often public, buildings. (84) The stork's nest on the peak of the roof, rendered with the same pigment as the turrets, signals good fortune. (85) The building's ordered geometry evokes an outer world that is controlled, precise, and enduring, whereas the yard's disarray runs counter to the conventional association of work with prosperity and order.

Artists who knew The Grinder's Family tended to re-form Ter Borch's vision along more reassuring lines. One of two direct visual responses to this work is a canvas variously attributed to one of two artists from Zwolle, Johannes van Cuylenburch or Jan Grasdorp (Fig. 21). This image simplifies and conventionalizes Ter Borch's iconography and adds picturesque details. (86) The tools visible through the door make the association with the smith profession unambiguous (despite the incongruity of coupling a dangerously fiery forge with an animal-driven mechanism). The painting also transforms Ter Borch's grand civic building into a rustic cottage, its humble red-tiled roof overgrown with charming vines. The artist added towers behind, based on the medieval fortifications of Zwolle, thus emphasizing the local character of the scene and suggesting the time-honored nature of the activity. (87) He brought the workmen forward and eliminated the mother and child, transforming the site into an unproblematically busy workplace. Supplanting disarray with cozy clutter, he even inserted an anecdotal touch familiar in contemporary Dutch peasant art--a cock humorously confronting a chicken.

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

In light of Ter Borch's contact with Delft during the period when he was executing The Grinder's Family, it is possible that the Delft artist Pieter de Hooch might also have known this work and responded indirectly to its yard motif. (88) In any event, de Hooch took the concept in a radically different direction in the early 1660s (Fig. 22). His semienclosed yards, with glimpses of the public world beyond, function as domestic idylls, sharing their formal and ideological structures with the neat, upper-middle-class interiors he was painting in the same years. Not by chance, women prevail in both his yards and his interiors, in contrast to Ter Borch's deliberate mixing of genders. The messy yard and shabby shed of The Grinder's Family look all the more unkempt--and ordinary--when compared with de Hooch's utopian spaces. (89)

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

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)

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

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.

There is nothing overtly subversive and certainly nothing dreary about this painting. Ter Borch's picture exhibits the same careful observation and mimetic virtuosity that he was concurrently developing for his high-life interiors. Here, instead of depicting satin and gold, he has devoted his energy to the rich textures of masonry and slate. The grindstone's axle gleams; the water from its trough runs diagonally, in glistening rivulets, across the uneven terrain. In fact, such painstaking detail calls attention to Ter Borch's own labor in its painting. In technique as well as iconography, The Grinder's Family celebrates the art of seeing, and at the same time reveals the artist visibly sharpening his art.

A Continent of Workers

I have referred to all the paintings discussed above as "outliers" within the field of Dutch genre art. It must be stressed that these images also constituted a body of work nearly unique in all of Europe at the time. Outside the Dutch borders, genre painting evolved fitfully, if at all, with images of workingmen thin on the ground. For three centuries, only the merest glimpses of labor appeared, mostly in genrelike depictions of gods or saints associated with the trades and crafts.

There were exceptions, of course. In Bologna, Annibale Carracci's Butcher Shop comes to mind; in Seville, Diego Velazquez's Waterseller; in Rome, the Flemish artist Michael Sweerts's evocative Roman Street Scene, with its grouping of knife grinder, butcher client, and stonecutter; in Antwerp, David Ryckaert III's cobblers. For heavy physical labor, one must look to forge scenes derived from the Vulcan myth by such artists as Tintoretto, the Bassano, the Le Nain, and Velazquez. In England in the early 1770s, with the industrial revolution at full steam and Enlightenment ideas holding sway, Joseph Wright of Derby replaced ancient mythology with present reality, executing several nocturnes of manufacturing and the mechanical arts. Despite their Romanticized settings, Wright's workers work hard, and in contrast to Ter Borch's vagueness about machinery, Wright details every aspect of the metalworking process. (93)

By the mid-nineteenth century, the social, political, and cultural landscape throughout Europe had changed irrevocably. Labor finally emerged as a major thematic concern for both artists and their audiences. In England, the "Gospel of Work" gave art about labor a role in defining personal and even national identity. In France, the 1848 Revolution raised labor to one of the major artistic subjects of the age. By then industrialization, the free market, and related factors had begun to undermine traditional artisanal culture in favor of factory-based production. These altered economic realities led to altered views of the laborer, redefining occupational categories and reevaluating individual skills. Workers' self-definition began to change accordingly; class began to displace rank (stand) as a mark of the worker's identity.

Ford Madox Brown's ambitious, ideologically self-conscious Work of 1852-65 (Fig. 4) constructs a veritable cross section of urban society that castigates the idle rich as it extols the moral worth of the laborer. William Bell Scott's equally outsize panorama of industrial strength, Iron and Coal: The Nineteenth Century (1861), fills its space with heroic male workers cast in time-honored poses. Like Wright and Madox Brown, Scott presented his workers in poses that are typically more vigorous, more expansive than those of the seventeenth-century workers we have discussed. Unlike the Dutch preference for images of craftsmen alone or as part of a modest family workshop, these later artists tended to arrange their figures in teams of active forms. (94)

Mid-nineteenth-century French painters, particularly the academic ones, celebrated the subject with a grandeur and eloquence comparable to the English approach. French Realist painters, however, preferred subjects drawn from country toil rather than from urban industrial operations. Similarly, they ignored the ongoing transformation of agriculture by mechanization--a process at odds with the agrarian myth they were intent on promoting. (95) The play of male bodies against machinery was more evident in French popular prints. Indeed, in both France and England, print culture expanded to include a wide range of industrial material, from encyclopedic catalogs of hardware and the latest mechanized inventions to richly illustrated journals, such as L'Illustration or the Illustrated London News, which frequently took current events relating to industrialization as their topics.

Van Gogh's Artisans

Rather few of the nineteenth-century journal illustrations showed skilled artisans laboring in workshops. The trades and crafts print tradition had largely died out, along with its serial taxonomies of communally based craftsmen. Likewise, despite the nostalgic vision of the historical artisan that the culture nurtured to counteract the harsh realities of modernity, few English or French painters depicted this remnant of the early modern economy. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a Dutch artist, Vincent van Gogh, who found this traditional subject worthy of sustained attention. (96)

Van Gogh's encounter with impoverished peasant weavers in his native Brabant led to an important body of work during his early Nuenen period, images driven by his own fervent sense of social commitment and colored, perhaps, by the journal prints' visualization of machinery (Fig. 23). These works necessarily return our attention to seventeenth-century Dutch art, with the caveat that van Gogh had no specific knowledge of the artisan paintings by Brekelenkam or the others discussed here, nor of earlier images specifically related to weaving (for example, Fig. 8). He wrote his brother Theo that his own engagement with laboring men was entirely modern, divorced from previous art. "[T]he figures in the pictures of old masters [Dutch and Spanish] do not work," he concluded. (97) Nevertheless, he conceived of his weaver images within the general tradition of Dutch painting, as another of his comments makes clear. He wanted to make their "color and tone harmonize with other Dutch pictures ...." (98) The harmony he sought is evident not only in the palette of these weaver paintings but also in their presentation of the workers: alone, bent, and distinctly unheroic of body.

[FIGURE 23 OMITTED]

Yet careful examination of van Gogh's weavers reveals something alien to what we have encountered in earlier Dutch art. As he learned more about the economic challenges afflicting these men, his images grew stark and disquieting. He made the looms--with their complicated geometry and their close-up, dominating frames--appear "monstrous," as he phrased it. Within the claustrophobic space of the cottages, bare of domestic comforts, these huge, dwarfing contraptions express the unsettled nature of the occupation in his time. With modernization had come a shift to large-scale, mechanized textile manufacturing, against which the local artisan had to devise an inevitably less advantageous and less independent mode of working. While conservative in their subject matter, van Gogh's pictures register this grim reality in an unconservative manner, by presenting the weaver as mastered by his loom. Instead of suggesting efficiency and productivity, the machine appears as the worker's nemesis, enveloping him, binding him in its warp and weft.

Van Gogh did not know, of course, that the seeds of this change had been sown in the seventeenth century. As the economy progressed from pre- to proto- to fully industrialized, the visual image of the artisan changed as well. The early print taxonomies had implied a secure niche and complete stasis. Brekelenkam and other painters showed an expansion of the artisan ideal--a worker integrated into his society and justly compensated for his work. He labors for labor's own sake, yet prosperity and stability prove to be the fruits of his industriousness. In quite different ways, the images by Metsu and Ter Borch began to interrogate the artisan's relation to prosperity. One pitted a worthy blacksmith against his wealthier client; the other juxtaposed the milieu of the craftsman with that of the class that could literally look down on him.

Two centuries later, the link between industriousness, self-sufficiency, and economic success had vanished, along with any affirmation of the artisan's place in the larger society. Van Gogh's images of work offer little to reassure their viewers, much to provoke them.

Alison McNeil Kettering, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Art History, is the author of Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate in the Rijksmuseum (1988), various articles and essays on Gerard ter Borch's paintings, and Rembrandt's Group Portraits (2006). She is president emerita of Historians of Netherlandish Art [Department of Art and Art History, Carleton College, 1 N. College St., Northfield, Minn. 55057, aketteri@carleton.edu].

Notes

I am immensely grateful to H. Perry Chapman for her many astute and challenging comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to the anonymous readers who offered suggestions for broadening and clarifying. I would also like to thank Annette de Vries for bibliographical suggestions and Emile van Binnebeke for discussing seventeenth-century material culture with me. Hans Luijten, as always, offered his time generously in response to my queries about primary sources. Portions of the paper were delivered at a session of the Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium of Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges, a symposium on the art of Gerard ter Borch at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (November 2005), and the annual conference of the Werkgroep van de Zeventiende Eeuw (September 2006), whose participants contributed valuable questions and commentary. Research for the essay was supported by Carleton College.

1. One anomaly within the category of artisan-at-work is beyond the scope of this study, namely, the artist in his studio, a subject that attracted many seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Nor will portraits of artisans bearing attributes of their occupations be discussed because in them the men are not presented as physically involved in their trades. On the latter, see L. de Vries, "Portraits of People at Work," in Opstellen voor Hans Locher, ed. J. de Jong (Groningen: Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 1990), 52-59; and H. Perry Chapman, Wouter Th. Koek, and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Jan Steen, Painter and Storyteller, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1996, cat. no. 8.

2. A. T. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), is a good example.

3. For the most recent discussion of images of labor, see Annette de Vries, Ingelijst Werk: De verbeelding van arbeid en beroep in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004). Christopher Brown devotes a brief, though helpful, section on depictions of labor in Images of a Golden Past (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 88-100. See also Egbert Haverkamp Begemann's discussion of the dearth of images of labor in seventeenth-century Dutch painting as a whole in "Jacob van Ruisdael's Interest in Construction," in Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive, Presented on His Seventy-fifth Birthday, ed. A. J. Adams et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995), 97-99. Other scholars have considered early modern images of work as embodiments of the Protestant work ethic, though this stance has recently been questioned in light of the general reassessment of Max Weber's notion of the work ethic. See Ilja Veldman, "Images of Labor and Diligence in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Prints: Was the Work Ethic Rooted in Civic Morality or Protestantism?" Simiolus 21 (1992): 227-64. Nevertheless, de Vries and Veldman interpret the artisan paintings primarily as images of industriousness.

4. On domestic imagery, see Mariet Westermann, "'Costly and Curious, Full off pleasure and home contentment': Making Home in the Dutch Republic," in Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Westermann, exh. cat., Newark Museum, Newark, N.J. (Zwolle: Waanders, 2001), esp. 74; and Wooncultuur in de Nederlanden / The Art of Home in the Netherlands, 1500-1800, ed. J. de Jong et al., Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 51 (2001).

5. Angelika Lasius, Quiringh van Brekelenkam (Beukenlaan: Davaco, 1992).

6. On Ter Borch's painting, the most recent commentary can be found in Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Gerard ter Borch, with contributions by Alison McNeil Kettering, Arie Wallert, and Marjorie E. Wieseman, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2004, cat. no. 24 (by Kettering). For earlier discussions, see S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959-60), vol. 1, 90-92, vol. 2, cat. no. 100; H. R. Hoetink, Gerard ter Borch, Zwolle 1617-Deventer 1681, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1974, 114-15; and Peter Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984, 142-43, cat. no. 8.

7. On Metsu's painting, see Franklin W. Robinson, Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667): A Study of His Place in Dutch Genre Painting of the Golden Age (New York: Abner Schram, 1974), 50; and Sutton, Dutch Genre Painters, cat. no. 70.

8. On the history of early modern women in the workplace, see Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 596-603; Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Els Kloek et al., eds., Women of the Golden Age: An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland, England and Italy (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), pt. 2. The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam has recently developed a project, Women's Work in the Northern Netherlands in the Early Modern Period (ca. 1500-1815), with Ariadne Schmidt as manager. On images of working women, see Elizabeth A. Honig, "Desire and Domestic Economy," Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 294-315; and A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 215-36.

9. Nanette Salomon, "Domesticating the Peasant Father: The Confluent Ideologies of Gender, Class, and Age," in Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), 93-138. In 2006 the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, held a multidisciplinary conference that included papers and workshops on theorizing early modern masculinity and maleness, and in 2007, one of the sessions at the annual Renaissance Society of America conference focused on masculinity in early modern Netherlandish art.

10. Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); and Martin Danahay, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005). I am especially indebted to Barringer's book for its encouragement to think more subtly about masculinity in relation to work.

11. For accounts of the meanings of work before the industrial age, see James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 1, who traces negative attitudes about manual labor to the Greek philosophers, whose influence on Christian theologians' thinking was enormous; William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chaps. 1, 2; Sewell, "Visions of Labor: Illustrations of the Mechanical Arts before, in, and after Diderot's Encyclopedie," in Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice, ed. Cynthia J. Koepp and Steven Laurence Kaplan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 258-86; and Rudolf Dekker, "Handwerkslieden en arbeiders in Holland van de zestiende tot de achttiende eeuw: Identiteit, cultuur en protest," in cultuur en Maatschappij in Nederland, 1500-1850: Een historisch-antropologisch perspectief, ed. P. te Boekhorst et al. (Meppel: Boom/Open Universiteit, 1992), 111. See also Benjamin A. Rifkin, The Book of Trades, Jost Amman and Hans Sachs (New York: Dover, 1973), introduction, xiv-xxiii; Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, rev. ed. by A. Elton of the original 1947 ed. (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), 55-61, which includes a brief history of the "artes mechanicae"; and A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, who esp. in chap. 1 discusses Christian attitudes toward labor.

12. On diligence as an important component of the early modern work ethic, see Veldman, "Images of Labor," 263, who discusses the wealth of sixteenth-century didactic, allegorical prints on the theme of Labor and Diligence. See also A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 51.

13. Johan van Nyenborgh, Tooneel der Ambachten of Den Winckel der Handtwercken en Konsten (Groningen: Jacob Sipkes, 1659). A well-educated gentleman-scholar, van Nyenborgh enjoyed local (Groningen) fame for didactic texts, and, typical of most early modern writers on labor, he had little firsthand experience of artisans.

14. For example, van Nyenborgh reworked van de Venne's "Sinnighe Slijpers Liedt" of 1623 in simple fashion (ibid., 90-91) and illustrated his own "Slijpers Liedt" with a print. The print was adapted from an illustration in Petrus Baardt's Deughden spoor in de ondeughden des werelts affgebeeldt (Leeuwarden, 1645), 203. Baardt's original (if in fact it was published for the first time there) has the grinder sharpening his customer's tongue. On this motif, see Marc van Vaeck, Adriaen van de Vennes Tafereel van de Belacchende Werelt, The Hague 1635 (Ghent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 1994), vol. 2, 759.

15. Van Nyenborgh's introductory pages, for example, list the simple attributes of various occupations and the complaints of each trade's artisans, interspersed with moralizing derived from such proverbs as "Doch men krijght niet sonder arbeyt" (You don't achieve much [mastery] without work), 13, and "Armoede is des luyheyts loon" (Poverty is the wage of idleness), 31.

16. In the seventeenth century, the type of Renaissance allegorical print equipped with helpful inscriptions that Veldman discusses gave way to more descriptive representations of work-related activities. See Veldman, "Images of Labor," 264.

17. Adriaen van de Venne, Tafereel van de Belacchende Wereld (The Hague, 1635), 215--one of the aphorisms in the margins (my emphasis), in van Vaeck, Adriaen van de Vennes Tafereel, vol. 2, 531. On van de Venne's often ironic use of aphorisms and other marginal notes, see Mariet Westermann, "Fray en Leelijck: Adriaen van de Venne's Invention of the Ironic Grisaille," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999): 234. Van de Venne was also the regular illustrator of the emblem books of Jacob Cats, who occasionally used the world of artisanal labor as his starting point. For Cats's emblem in Spiegel van den Ouden en Nieuwen Tijdt (Mirror of the Old and New Time; 1632) on the lessons to be learned from poorly run smithies, van de Venne provided a hyperbolically chaotic blacksmith's shop that frightens even the smith's wife and children. The emblem's motto, the proverb "Daerder veel smeden moetmen slach houden" (With too many smiths, one must hold one's blow), and its related texts give insight into normative Dutch attitudes about the need for cooperation, practicality, and what we today would call observing a correct chain of authority in the workshop, a modern idea, with implications for the well-run, productive society.

18. The full set of poems was published in Tafereel van Sinnemal (Middle-burg, 1623), 75-87. For a facsimile of Zeevsche Nachtegael (1623), see P.J. Meertens and P.J. Verkruijsse, eds. (Middelburg: Verhage en Zoon, 1982). See also F. W. H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, c. 1450-1700 (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1990), vol. 35, 153, no. 452 (Anonymous after Adriaen van de Venne).

19. For another mid-seventeenth-century grinder's song, see Natascha Veldhorst, De Haearlemse Bloempjes, Haarlemse Doelenreeks, 4 (Haarlem: Stadsbibliotheek Haarlem and Kalander, Stichting voor Cultuurhistorische Projecten, 1999), 64-66.

20. See Westermann, "Fray en Leelijck," for a discussion of van de Venne's use of the paradoxical encomium. At one point in "Sinnighe Slijpers Liedt," van de Venne has the itinerant playfully mention the capacity of the grindstone to sharpen the wits of dullards. This idea is developed fully in van de Venne's satirical grisaille, Al te Bot, in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, and his related print in Tafereel van de Belacchende Wereld (see Westermann, 229, 233). See also Eddy de Jongh and Ger Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life: Genreprints in the Netherlands, 1550-1700, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1997, 238. In his Sinne- en Minnebeelden (1618), Cats, too, played with properties of the grindstone that had since antiquity been considered delightfully paradoxical: though blunt by nature, it has the capacity to sharpen. See van Vaeck, Adriaen van de Vennes Tafereel, vol. 3, 756-61, vol. 2, 531. Petrus Baardt used the same idea in his commentary on the Grinder in Deughden spoor, 203; he illustrates his text with a grinder sharpening the tongue of his client. In fact, he compares the whole crazy world to a grindstone, a common comparison at the time. My thanks to Rod Nevitt for this information.

21. For trades cycles in stained-glass windows, see Jane Welch Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). In addition to Chartres, Bourges, Rouen, Beauvais, Amiens, St-Quentin, Tours, and Le Mans had such windows. The tradition of stained-glass representations of the trades, at least in a secular context, continued in the early modern period. For windows in houses and perhaps such public buildings as guild halls, see Timothy Husband, The Luminous Image: Painted Glass Roundels in the Lowlands, 1480-1560, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1995, 86-87. As for calendar illustrations in medieval books of hours, see Wilhelm Hansen, Kalenderminiaturen der Stundenbucher, Mittelalterliches Leben im Jahreslauf (Munich: Callwey, 1984).

22. On the medieval and Renaissance technical manuals, house-books, handbooks, and treatises on trades and engineering that provided source material for Amman and Sachs, see Rifkin, The Book of Trades, xiv. See also Rolf Dieter Jessewitsch, Das "Standebuch" des Jost Amman (1568) (Munster, 1987).

23. Nowhere does the Standebuch find space for unskilled laborers and itinerants, except for the itinerant Peddler (Kraemer), whose image was reused for the very last figure, the despicable Stocknarr, or Natural Fool.

24. The influence of the Standebuch reached far, including, for example, Tommaso Garzoni's Piazza universersale di tutte le professioni, a book that was published in many editions throughout the seventeenth century, including one in German. See Sheila McTighe, "Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the Imaginaire of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci's Arti di Bologna in 1646," Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993): 80.

25. Harry Bober, Jan van Vliet's Book of Crafts and Trades: With a Reappraisal of His Etchings (Albany, N.Y.: Early American Industries Association, 1981); and Donna R. Barnes, "Jan Gillisz. Van Vliet: Workers in the Workplace," Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis 2 (1995): 3-17. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. 41, 32-49. Van Vliet represents only the eighteen most common occupations.

26. Jan Luyken and Casper Luyken, Spiegel van 't Menselyk Bedryf (Amsterdam, 1694). See Donna R. Barnes, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker: Jan Luyken's Mirrors of 17th-Century Dutch Daily Life, exh. cat., Hofstra Museum, Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., 1995. For commentary on the liberties that Luyken's book took with actuality, see P. Lourens and J. Lucassen, "Ambachtsgilden binnen een handelskapitalistische stad: Aanzetten voor een analyse van Amsterdam rond 1700," NEHA, Jaarboek voor economische, bedrijfts- en techniekgeschiedenis 61 (1998): 121-62, esp. 157-58.

27. For the influence of the Mennonite tradition on Jan Luyken and, to a lesser extent, his collaborator son Caspar, see Herman W.J. Vekeman, "The Mirror of Human Trades, the Writing Plan," in Barnes, The Butcher, the Baker, 252-55.

28. Maurits de Meyer, De Volks- en kinderprent in de Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e eeuw (Amsterdam: Standaard-Boekhandel, 1962), lists popular prints that rework Jan Luyken's occupational images, for example, nos. 54 and 55 of the sheets published by J. Noman (p. 246).

29. See Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. 41, 32-49, copy a, 173. Hollstein does not list the example in Schloss Wolfegg (vol. 35, 179) referred to here. My thanks to John Roger Paas for calling my attention to this broadside, whose first line is "Ghy arbeyt om profyt doch die niet werkt moet vasten" (Work for profit, whoever doesn't work must starve).

30. De Meyer, De Volks- en kinderprent, fig. 166 (no. 259 in de Meyer's list of sheets published by J. Noman, p. 254).

31. Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 22-23, referring to Cries broadsides, but the point applies equally to trades broadsides. See also Angela Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), esp. 12.

32. See Karen F. Beall, Cries and Itinerant Trades, Kaufrufe und Strassenhandler (Hamburg: Dr. Ernst Hauswedell, 1975). See also Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, fig. 1.9, for images of tradesmen mixed with hawkers. Cries imagery also appeared in ensembles of single-leaf prints. See de Meyer, De Volks- en kinderprent, pp. 541-50, for the Dutch audience's familiarity with both multi-image broadsides and print ensembles. See also Beall's section (397-437) on Cries prints issued by Dutch and Flemish publishers, most from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Earlier in the Dutch Republic, Leonard Bramer's drawings of hawkers (1650-55) showed a thorough familiarity with the tradition, though his series interspersed them with representations of established artisans in their shops, and it remained unpublished in print form. (Bramer did not include an itinerant grinder.) See Donna R. Barnes, Street Scenes: Leonart Bramer's Drawings of 17th-Century Dutch Daily Life, exh. cat., Hofstra Museum, Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., 1991.

33. Jan Pluis, De Nederlandse tegel decors en benamingen/The Dutch Tile Designs and Names, 1570-1930 (Leiden: Nederlands Tegelmuseum; Vrienden van het Nederlands Tegelmuseum in Samenwerking met Primavera Pers, 1998), 350-52.

34. The scraping sound caused by the sharpening was one of the reasons that William Hogarth included the grinder in his print The Enraged Musician (1741); see Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, figs. 4-8. The grinder began to carry negative associations long before Hogarth, for example, Israhel van Meckenem's King David with Sayings from Psalms (1480s, reworked by Pieter van der Heyden in the 1560s), with the inscription for the grinder "Ich slyp ick wend ende keer myn huycks-ken nae den wynd" (I grind, I turn, and face my cape toward the wind, or, to use an English expression, he sees which way the wind blows). The adjective geslepen still means "sly." See David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62-63.

35. See de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 561-62, on the impoverished economic condition of street merchants, a reality that Ostade's print hints at. Nevertheless, Ostade's etching accompanied a cheerful poem in Jan van Gijsen and A. van Hulenroy's Het Vermaaklyk Buitenleven, of de zingende en spelende Boeren-vreugd (Haarlem, 1716), 23; the etching illustrates a song that was probably influenced by van de Venne's "Sinnighe Slijpers Liedt" mentioned earlier. See Louis Peter Grijp, "Muziek bij Haarlems satire en vermaak," in Satire en Vermaak: Het genrestuk in de tijd van Frans Hals, 1610-1670, ed. P. Biesboer and M. Sitt, exh. cat., Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, 2003, 58. For another mid-seventeenth-century grinder's song, see Veldhorst, De Haarlemse Bloempjes, 64-66.

36. Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast.

37. For example, the Hoorn preacher Jacobus Hondius categorized the trades thus in his compendium of sins, Swart register van duysent sonden, als een staeltje, diendende tot ontdeckinge, ende opweckinge, van der vervallen yver en godtvruchtigheyt der hedendaeghsche genaemde ledematen in de Gereformeerde Christelijcke gemeynten van Nederlandt (1679). See A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 261 n. 115, 232. The same sort of enumeration appears in Samuel van Hoogstraten's play De Roomsche Paulina, 1660, act 3, in the voice of the servant Klitus. My thanks to Rod Nevitt for this reference. Also worth citing is Petrus Baardt's Deughden spoor, which treats occupations (some real, some pretend) as metaphors for negative moral traits, in the vein of Erasmus's In Praise of Folly (which Baardt mentions, 7).

38. The sorts of itinerants presented in Cries prints do sometimes appear amid the crowds in paintings of marketplaces or village streets but are rarely featured in such contexts. Among the exceptions are the grinders that appear in Caspar Netscher's painting The Knife Grinder (Galleria Sabauda, Turin, inv. no. 67); Michael Sweerts's painting Street Scene with a Grinder and an Artist Drawing Bernini's Nepture and Triton (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. no. 2358); and Jan Baptist Weenix's painting Couple with a Scissors Grinder (formerly Alte Pinakothek, Munich; cat. 1908, no. 633). The latter are set in (remote) Mediterranean locales.

39. Jan Lucassen, "Labour and Early Modern Economic Development," in A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective, ed. Karel Davids and Lucassen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 367-409, esp. 387-400; Lourens and Lucassen, "Ambachtsgilden"; and K. Goudriaan, M. Hulshof, Piet Lourens, and Jan Lucassen, De Gilden in Gouda, exh. cat., Stedelijke Musea Gouda (Zwolle: Waanders, 1996), 124. See also Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).

40. For the Dutch theoretician Karel van Mander's reference to Peiraikos, see van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem: Paschier van Wesbusch, 1604), 6r. For Samuel van Hoogstraten's reference, see Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, Anders de Zichtbaere Werelt (Rotterdam: Fransois van Hoogstraeten, 1678), 87. In Spain, for the references to Peiraikos by Pacheco and Palomino, see B. Wind, Velazquez's Bodegones: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Genre Painting (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1987), 9, 14, 83.

41. Pliny, Natural History 35.112.

42. On theoretical writing about genre painting (sparse though it was in the Dutch Republic), see the summary in Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 132.

43. Brown, Images, 88-89. For Cornelis Dekker's paintings of weavers, see Linda Stone-Ferrier, Images of Textiles: The Weave of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Society (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985), 42, figs. 13-17; and A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 211-43.

44. Angelika Lasius, "Die Schumacher- und Schneiderdarstellungen des Niederlandischen Malers Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam," Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 50 (1989): 141-61; Lasius, Quiringh van Brekelenkam; and A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 155-87.

45. For Brekelenkam's depiction of a kettle smith, see Lasius, Quiringh van Brekelenkam, 89, cat. no. 32.

46. Many decades before Brekelenkam, Hendrik Goltzius had juxtaposed the quiet domestic activity of a woman at her lace making with the physical effort of her husband's carpentry. See de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 72, fig. 2.

47. Oudenrogge was brother-in-law to Brekelenkam. Adriaan Waiboer (in written correspondence) states that the smith paintings by Oudenrogge were executed by 1648, the date of his move to Haarlem. On Beelt's painting, see V. A. Sadkov, "Newly Identified Paintings by Pieter van der Croos and Cornelis Beelt," in Shop Talk, 219-20. Another example is a panel, dated 1655, attributed to Adriaen or Isaak van Ostade, which pictures a woman and her child alarmed by the drama of the smiths next to their forge (art market). The photo collection of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, includes a number of additional renderings of smithies that feature darkened interiors with active figures around the forge, including one by Evert van der Poel (Museum, Kiev [formerly?]). Unfortunately, the attributions of very few of the others are secure.

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.

57. H. Perry Chapman, "Women in Vermeer's Home: Mimesis and Ideation," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 51 (2000): 241-43. In support of her argument about the schilderachtigheid of Vermeer's Little Street (1657-58; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Chapman cites (among others) Boudewijn Bakker, "Schilderachtig: Discussions of a Seventeenth-Century Term and Concept," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 23 (1995): 147-62. Bakker makes clear that the term changed during the later part of the century to signify more refined qualities. But during the first fifty to sixty years, it included the naturalistic, homely, and evocative. See also Caroline van Eck, ed., Het Schilderachtige: Studies over het schilderachtige in de Nederlandse Kunsttheorie en architectuur, 1650-1900 (Amsterdam: Architectura en Natura Pers, 1994). Linda Stone-Ferrier was the first, however, to draw attention to Rembrandt's notion of the schilderachtig (without using the term), namely, his choice to reject modernity (urban Amsterdam) in favor of etching the old, dilapidated, rural, and traditional. See her "Rembrandt's Landscape Etchings: Defying Modernity's Encroachment," Art History 15 (1992): 403-33.

58. Franits, Dutch Genre Painting, 135-38. Adriaen van Ostade's later peasant paintings characterize the figures as well behaved and sympathetic.

59. Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, 70. This is corroborated by another Englishman, Owen Feltham, 1652, who exclaimed about the richness of Dutch interiors that "even the poorest are there furnisht with [pictures]. Not a cobbler [a sort of Everyman] but has his toyes for ornament." Quoted in John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2000), 105. A significant (though small) percentage of buyers at Dutch auctions and lotteries were artisans, though many of the purchases must have been cheap copies.

60. On ownership of paintings by artisans, see A. de Vries, Ingelijst Werk, 161, 182; and Eric Jan Sluijter, "'All striving to adorne their houses with costly peeces': Two Case Studies of Paintings in Wealthy Interiors," in Westermann, Art and Home, 104-5. On Brekelenkam's pictures specifically, Sluijter has found that his paintings (of subjects other than artisans) sold for relatively modest prices. He also discovered that owners came from the local Leiden clientele, including several who were quite wealthy. See Sluijter; and Leidse fijnschilders, Van Gerrit Dou tot Frans van Mieris de Jonge, 1630-1760, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, 1988, 41. It should be emphasized that most of the paintings discussed in the present article were likely sold to fairly prosperous individuals; see Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 2.

61. Venus and Amor in the Smith of Vulcan, art market, 1896 (Lugt 54374) (HdG 18). See Robinson, Gabriel Metsu, fig. 13. The subject allowed Metsu to engage the oppositions of powerful/weak and ugly/beautiful. The theme of another painting representing a blacksmith, in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (with a secure attribution), likely connected either with a contemporary incident or with a literary effort.

62. Ibid., fig. 14: The Blacksmith's Shop, 39 3/8 by 33 1/2 in. (100 by 85 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

63. The seventeenth-century English writer Joseph Moxon commented, "without the invention of smithing most other mechanick inventions would be at a stand[still], the instruments or tools that are used in them being either made of iron or some other matter formed by the help of iron," in Mechanick Exercises: or the Doctrine of Handy-Works, Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklayery (London, 1703, facsimile of 3rd ed., with introduction by Benno M. Forman, ed. Charles F. Montgomery; New York: Praeger, 1970). The first edition, published in 1678, was a how-to manual that presented a body of theoretical knowledge in usable form. It is worth noting that whereas the English tradition of smithery distinguished blacksmiths (who work with iron) from whitesmiths (who work with other metals), the Dutch distinguished smiths according to the size and weight of the objects they worked with.

64. Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam in zyne opkomst.... (Amsterdam, 1760-1802), 444: St. Eloijen of Smids Gilde: Grof en Klein Smids, Slotenmaakers, Koperstaagers, Messenmaakers, Zwaardveegers, Roerenmaakers. The records of the Gouda guild in 1614 list some of the same categories. See Goudriaan et al., De Gilden in Gouda, 124.

65. The records of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, include mention of the examination for scythe maker in Zwolle, which suggests this was a separate specialty within the metalsmith guild. As for visualizations, Amman included such specialized smiths as the scythe maker (Fig. 7) and armorer, bell maker, and locksmith, whereas van Vliet's smaller series included only the blacksmith and locksmith. Occasionally artists depicted the veterinary practices of the smith; for example, Paulus Potter, The Farrier's Shop (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), in which a smith struggles to file a horse's teeth. See Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 198-99.

66. It is no wonder that blacksmith imagery often served to embody Fire in allegorical print series of the four elements. For examples, see Linda Stone-Ferrier, "From Shrew to Poetess, Two Non-Traditional Female Roles Evoked by a Curious Painting by Gabriel Metsu," in Saints, Sinners and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 226.

67. Such horse frames appear in a heterogeneous category that includes shops as well as village scenes of farriers shoeing horses by such artists as Paulus Potter, Philips Wouwerman, Jan Victors, Hendrick Verschuring, Pieter van Laer, and David Teniers. A particularly good example is Potter's A Farrier's Shop, 1648 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), in Wheelock, Dutch Paintings.

68. Adriaan Waiboer, "The Early Years of Gabriel Metsu," Burlington Magazine 147 (2005): 90. Only around the time of Metsu's move to Amsterdam in about 1655, just a few years before painting Interior of a Smithy, did he devote himself (nearly) exclusively to genre themes.

69. Public relief sculptural representations of the legend could be found in Florence (Or San Michele) and Utrecht (Oudegracht 309), among other places. See also Paul Brandt, Schaffende Arbeit und Bildende Kunst im Altertum und Mittelalter, vol. 1 (Leipzig: A. Kroner, 1927), 297, who reproduces an engraving from Giordano Ruffo, Libro de la natura di cavalli (Venice, 1517 and 1519), of Saint Eligius pounding a shoe onto the (removed) horse's hoof while the horse and its groom wait.

70. H. Perry Chapman, "Persona and Myth in Houbraken's Life of Jan Steen," Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 141. See also Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 118.

71. My thanks to Nancy Thompson and Andrea Gasten for discussing the windows with me.

72. Pieter de la Court, Interest van Holland ofte gronden van Hollands welvaren, 38, as quoted in Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500-1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 184: "... the same discomfort is felt by [elite] men in the cities, where the craftsmen and servants are more unbearable than in any other land."

73. Brown, Images, 91, describes the painting as exhibiting "virtuous poverty."

74. Franits, Dutch Genre Painting, 191; and Lasius, Quiringh van Brekelenkam, 61-62. Brekelenkam's Tailor's Workshop, 1661, whereabouts unknown (Lasius 54), has the wife picking nits from her child's head. In addition to The Grinder's Family, Ter Borch represented the theme in a painting in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, this time with a middle-class woman removing a child's nits (Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, vol. 1, 254). In medical practice, cleansing lice (considered to thrive in dampness) from hair was considered especially necessary for women and young children, for, according to contemporary humoral theory, water predominated in both. See Johan van Beverwijck, De Schat der Gezondheid, Griffioen (Amsterdam: Em. Querido's Uitgeverij, 1992), 59-60 (a selection from the original 1651 and 1672 original editions, translated into twentieth-century Dutch by Lia van Gemert), who recommended routine cleansing as a preventive measure against Luisziekte (louse sickness, from infected sores). The container by the side of the pair in Ter Borch's The Grinder's Family might possibly have signaled the contemporary practice of using a vinegar-saltpeter-mustard solution for cleansing, recommended in van Beverwijck's handbook.

75. Merry E. Wiesner, "Spinning Out Capital: Women's Work in the Early Modern Economy," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. R. Bridenthal et al., 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 220-49.

76. See n. 65 above. A specialist scythe maker needed a grindstone to sharpen his scythe only once, immediately after manufacturing the tool. Thereafter, the tool user would have hammered it sharp with a haarhamer. On mental effort (the exercise of discipline and intelligence) as a requirement for the most honorable of the mechanical arts, alongside the more obvious physical strength, see Sewell, Work and Revolution, 23.

77. In his late-seventeenth-century painting of a Zwolle square, Gerrit Grasdorp included a hand-cranked grindstone, which Lydie van Dijk suggests was connected with the city stone yard; van Dijk, "Zwolse schilders in de 17de eeuw: Kracht in variatie," in J. Streng and van Dijk, Zwolle in de Gouden Eeuw, Cultuur en Schilderkunst, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Zwolle: Waanders, 1997), 48. The position Ter Borch's grinder takes, with his nose close to the grindstone, is the obvious origin of the English expression (for which there is no equivalent in Dutch). An example of a prone grinder operating a hand-cranked grinding mechanism can be seen in Karel van Mander's satirical The Grinding of Tongues, ca. 1592 (Hollstein 106), pendant to his The Forging of Heads (Hollstein 107).

78. Alf Schroeder, Entwicklung der Schleiftechnik bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Braunschweig: Technische Hochschule, 1930), figs. 62, 69, 73. For the primary sources, see The Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli: A Classic Sixteenth Century Illustrated Treatise on Technology, trans. Martha Teach Gnudi, with annotations by E. S. Ferguson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); V. Zonca, Novo teatro di machine et edificii (Padua: Appresso Pietro Bertelli, 1607), pl. 33; and G. A. Bockler, Theatrum machinarum novum (Nuremberg: Verlegung Paulus Fursten, 1661), pl. 38.

79. The Zwolle archives include reference to a slypmolen on the Walstraat, just a block from where Ter Borch grew up (RA 001-00026, December 17, 1620). RA 001-00032 and RA 001-00035 refer to one on the Diezerstraat in 1669 and 1688. I would like to thank J. H. van den Hoek Ostende for discussing slypmolens with me.

80. See Ach Lieve Tijd, 1000 Jaar Deventer, en Deventenaren en hun Nijverheid (Zwolle: Waanders, 1990), 297, with an illustration of the derelict condition of this sliepmolle, in 1863, as recorded in a watercolor by C. N. Storm van 's-Gravesande. The half tower in the watercolor bears no resemblance to the structures in Ter Borch's painting, nor is there any suggestion in Ter Borch's painting that the horse mill is collectively owned. My thanks to Nina Herweijer for additional information on this mill. See further G. Dumbar, Het Kerkelyk en Wereltlyk Deventer (Deventer, 1752), 14, who records that the slypmoolen had been used by smiths for grof ijzerwerk, that is, large iron items in need of sharpening. It should be emphasized that most ordinary, nonspecialist smiths producing smaller items would have used a hand-powered grindstone, as pictured in Metsu's painting (Fig. 3).

81. Luyken shows a common type of horse mill (rosmolen) built with a main lantern wheel raised high above the horse; he includes the three smaller gear wheels that it engages to drive the grindstones. Ter Borch shows a similar type of horse mill, also common, whose main lantern wheel is positioned close to the ground. It therefore requires a series of diagonal shafts to attach to the central post. In both images, the animal is harnessed to a bar that attaches to the main wheel. My thanks to both Stanley Challenger Graham and Emile van Binnebeke for discussing the mechanisms with me. Ter Borch would also have seen horse mills used for dredging, such as the one pictured by Gerrit Berckheyde in his 1671 painting of the modernization of Haarlem's ramparts, the only painting of such a mechanism that I have seen. See Quentin Buvelot and Hans Buijs, eds., A Choice Collection: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Paintings from the Frits Lugt Collection, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Hague, 2002, 58-61. For a drawing by Jacob van Ruisdael of a dredging machine, again, a highly unusual image, see Haverkamp Begemann, "Ruisdael's Interest in Construction," 98. On Amsterdam horse mills, none of them for grinding, see J. H. van den Hoek Ostende, "Rosmolens in Amsterdam 1519-1919," Jaarboek Amstelodamum, 1981, 15 (my thanks to Marten Jan Bok for this reference). Although windmills were built in huge numbers in the Dutch Republic owing to the absence of waterfalls and the presence of prevailing winds, animals provided a more consistently reliable source of power than wind, hence the frequent construction of horse mills.

82. Chapman discusses such cropping in Vermeer's Little Street as a strategy to suggest a slice-of-life effect. See Chapman, "Women in Vermeer's Home," 240.

83. Even though Ter Borch's actual working process was certainly more complicated than the recording of direct observation, various historians have tried to pinpoint the shop's location in Zwolle. Thomas J. de Vries, Geschiedenis van Zwolle (Zwolle: Erven J. J. Tijl, 1961), vol. 2, 40, placed it near the Blijmarkt. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, vol. 1, 92, located it in the neighborhood of the Dieserpoort, probably because the Smedenstraat (Smiths Street) lies near there. D. J. de Vries argued for a location near the Kamperstraat, adding that tax records indicate this neighborhood (rather than the Smedenstraat) was home to various smithies, among them a scythe maker; see "Het architectonisch decor van Ter Borchs Slijpersfamilie," in Bouwen en Duiden, studies over architectuur en iconologie, ed. E. den Hartog et al. (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1994), 189. In addition, de Vries (188) argued that the building with the slate roof at the back has coats of arms identifying it with a particular sixteenth-century regent. In the early seventeenth century the building belonged to a smith (presumably a prosperous one), though by the early 1650s it had been partially demolished. That Ter Borch intended his audience to recognize the building as local Zwolle architecture, associate it with a particular owner, or contrast it with the once-proud original seems questionable.

84. The turrets vaguely echo those of one of the towers built into Zwolle's medieval defense wall, a structure that Ter Borch recorded in an early drawing. See A. M. Kettering, Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate in the Rijksmuseum (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1988), 163. But I doubt he intended the building in the painting to refer specifically to the tower.

85. In the folklore of many regions, the stork has positive connotations. Children's prints featuring birds often included the stork with inscriptions connecting it to the fortune that summer brings, or to piety and devotion. See de Meyer, De Volks- en kinderprent, 246-47 (J. Noman, nos. 5, 98). See also Cesare Ripa's associations of the stork with dankbaarheid (thankfulness), godsvruchtigheid (godliness, piety), and beschut tegens verraed (protection against treason), in Ripa, Iconologia (Amsterdam: Dirck Pietersz. Pers, 1644). The stork's association with protection can also be found in H. K. Poot, Het groot natuur- en zedekundigh wereldtoneel, of woordenboek van meer dan 1200 aeloude Egiptische, Grieksche en Romeinsche zinnebeelden of beeldenspraak (Delft: R. Boitet, 1743-50), 124-25.

86. Nothing is known about the owners of Ter Borch's The Grinder's Family in the seventeenth century except that the painting is likely to have stayed in Zwolle long enough for this Zwolle artist to have made his free copy. My thanks to Kristin Bahre of the Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, for providing a tracing of Ter Borch's painting, and to Aaron H. De Groft, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, for laying it over the Ringling painting. In Dr. De Groft's opinion, the later artist made a free copy without use of a reproductive procedure such as a tracing.

87. Van Dijk, "Zwolse schilders," 47, identifies them as the Gelderse tower and the Luttekepoort, though she suggests that the artist has taken certain liberties.

88. On de Hooch's courtyard scenes, see Martha Hollander, "Public and Private Life in the Art of Pieter de Hooch," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 51 (2000): 273-93. Ter Borch is recorded in Delft in 1653, and visual evidence suggests the familiarity of both de Hooch and Vermeer with his paintings. See Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., "The Artistic Development of Gerard ter Borch," in Wheelock, Gerard ter Borch, 15.

89. Wolf, Vermeer, 58-59, interprets de Hooch's courtyard scenes as "utopian spaces" and "domestic idylls."

90. "Picturesque" evolved considerably in definition over the decades. By the late eighteenth century in France, the definition had changed from its definition both in the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and in the late seventeenth century. The description of Ter Borch's The Grinder's Family in the Recueil d'estampes gravees d'apres les tableaux du Cabinet de Monseigneur le Due de Choiseul (Paris, 1771), no. 60, calls the painting pittoresque: "L'exterieur d'une maison de paysan batie en brique, d'une composition tres pittoresque ...." The painting's first recorded owner was the duc de Choiseul. On changing definitions of the "picturesque," see Bakker, "Schilderachtig."

91. See Bakker, "Schilderachtig," 154, who discusses Dutch art's similar rejection of subjects connected with the urban development projects in the cities. See also Ann Jensen Adams, "Competing Communities in the 'Great Bog of Europe,'" in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 35-76; Stone-Ferrier, "Rembrandt's Landscape Etchings," esp. 417-19; Linda Stone-Ferrier, "Inclusions and Exclusions: The Selectivity of Adriaen van Ostade's Etchings," in S. William Pelletier et al., Adriaen van Ostade: Etchings of Peasant Life in Holland's Golden Age, University of Georgia, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, 1994, 21-29; and Haverkamp Begemann, "Ruisdael's Interest in Construction."

92. Audrey M. Lambert, The Making of the Dutch Landscape: An Historical Geography of the Netherlands (London: Academic Press, 1985), 208-12; and Leo Noordegraaf, "Dutch Industry in the Golden Age," in K. Davids and Noordegraaf, The Dutch Economy of the Golden Age (Amsterdam: Netherlands Economic History Archives, 1993), 131-57, esp. 152.

93. See Stephen Daniels, Joseph Wright, British Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 3. On nineteenth-century images of industrial blacksmiths by James Sharples, an amateur artist and professional smith, see Barringer, Men at Work, chap. 3. For the images by Tintoretto and others, see Turk, Bilder der Arbeit, 74-76.

94. On Madox Brown, see Barringer, Men at Work, chap. 1 and fig. 8; on Bell Scott, ibid., 159, fig. 70. My thanks to Baird Jarman for discussing with me his observations on nineteenth-century images of work.

95. Linda Nochlin, Realism (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971); and Monica Juneja, "The Peasant Image and Agrarian Change: Representations of Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century French Painting from Millet to van Gogh," Journal of Peasant Studies 15 (1988): 445-71.

96. Carol Zemel, "The 'Spook' in the Machine: Pictures of Weavers in Brabant," in Zemel, Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), chap. 2. Zemel discusses van Gogh's changing attitudes to these local weavers, whom by the end he called "spectral" and "spooks." See, too, Griselda Pollock, "Van Gogh and the Poor Slaves: Images of Rural Labour as Modern Art," Art History 11 (1988): 408-32.

97. Vincent van Gogh, The Complete letters (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1958), 401, Letter 418. In this same letter he comments further: "Is this [vigorous labor] something new?--yes--even the figures by Ostade, Terborch, are not in action like those painted nowadays." Zemel, "The 'Spook' in the Machine," cites this letter, 252 n. 4. Although van Gogh's letters reveal quite an extensive knowledge of earlier Dutch art, they do not refer to any of the pictures discussed here.

98. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters, 290, Letter 367.

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