4. Crafts & Profession
As well as the many seventeenth-century domestic utensils, the Van Beuningen-de Vriese Collection includes objects used in particular occupations. Wrought iron axes, hammers, adzes, chisels and awls were made by blacksmiths and used on a daily basis in countless occupations – by carpenters and cobblers, for example. Johannes van Vliet appears to have depicted every one of the carpenter’s tools, whilst Albert Cuyp used the instruments in a more modest way to decorate the scene of The Mussel Eater.
We see a man sitting on a barrel eating a portion of mussels in the middle of his smithy while three children look on. In front of him stands a stoneware bellarmine jug.
The painter Jan ter Borch choose to depict another profession. He showed a soldier with a glass of wine in his hand, lightening his pipe from a brass oil lamp which is placed on top of a candlestick.
5. Sickness & Health
If we are to believe seventeenth-century paintings and prints, most surgeons in those days were quacks, confidence tricksters who were after gullible folk’s money. Jan Steen painted The Cutting of the Stone around 1675. He reveals how the patient was plied with a large dose of brandy first, so that he would not feel the operation.
The quack pretends that he has removed a couple of stones from the patient’s head, and the painter shows that the ignorant patient was taken in by the quack‘s clever tricks. He wears a fool’s cap with a bell to show that he is the butt of the joke.. But also other medical treatments were of the interest of seventeenth century painters. For example, in Cornelis Dusart’s print we see The Cupper at work, using cupping glasses heated over an oil lamp.
6. Markets & Farmhouses
There is a category of seventeenth-century utensils and tools of which very few examples have been preserved in museums because of the perishable nature of the material they were made of. However, artists' depictions of wicker baskets, wooden buckets, sieves and yokes remain in seventeenth-century paintings and prints.
In genre paintings of fruit and vegetable markets like the painting of Sybrand van Beest we find many examples of these objects. Also scenes of farmhouses with their pedlars and milkmaids show beautiful types of these fragile seventeenth-century artifacts as shown in the print of Gerrit Bleker.
7. Travelling Artefacts
It is not only people who travel; objects, too, go around the world with or without their owners or dealers. Leonaert Bramer made the splendid print Still Life with Travelling Case, which includes a seventeenth-century stoneware bellarmine jug decorated with the arms of the City of Amsterdam. These heavy jugs were made in Germany in the stoneware factories of the little town of Frechen, and sometimes bore an imprinted medallion with the destination, customer or dealer.
Jugs like these were mainly used to hold wine and oil. Jugs like the bellarmine , and glassware like berkemeyers, a type of rummer, can be found in many seventeenth-century paintings and prints. In that period these objects found their way to destinations all over the world.
Note: Works on paper can change due to lux restrictions because of previous presentations.
Want to know more?
Sandra Tatsakis Director Touring Exhibitions T + 31 (0)10 44 19 421 tatsakis@boijmans.nl
