Title   Telhout (Search for the image)
Translated title Kindling Wood
Intro Text by dr D. Barnes, accompanying Bramer’s drawing of a kindle wood vendor (`telhout verkoper’)

Code of occupational group 45220
Description A man and young boy are lugging between them a very large wicker basket filled with pieces of kindling wood. Each wears a soft cap and carries an armload of wood under his free arm. In the background are the bricked arches and walls of a ruined structure overgrown with some trees and bushes.

Kindling and firewood was burned in home fireplaces to cook meals and to provide warmth. (Peat was also used as a household heating and cooking fuel.) Occasionally dried branches from pruned fruit trees was burned at home to produce aromatic smoke used to flavor cured hams which hung high above the hearth, suspended by a system of ropes and pulleys. Most households stored firewood in large baskets like the one carried by these two or in wooden crates or half-barrel tubs.

While the ruined building or fortification in the background might be Dutch, it is more likely Italianate, reflecting the time Bramer spent in Rome as a young artist, associating with other Dutch members of the Schildersbent. Bartolomeus Breenburgh, a founding member of that group, was especially taken with Roman ruins. Prints of his views of Rome were issued in the
1640's, long after he had returned to the Netherlands.

Bramer's recollections of his earlier days in Rome, perhaps jogged by either Breenburgh's prints, or Bramer's possible trip to Rome in 1648, might have led him to use such a backdrop. Bramer used Italianate backgrounds in other sets of drawings, notably his illustrations for the "Life of
Alexander the Great" and for Vondel's translation of Virgil's "Aeneid." Kindling wood sellers were also included among Pierre Brebiette's (ca. 1640-41) and Abraham Bosse's peddlers with their street cries.

Source Donna R. Barnes, Ed D, Street scenes, Leonard Bramer's drawings of seventeenth-century daily life (Hofstra Museum exhibition 1991). Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York.

Click here for the introductory essay on Bramer's drawings.



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