| Title |
|
Hebgi wat te kuipen (Search for the image) |
| Translated title |
Do You Need A Cooper? |
| Intro |
Text by dr D. Barnes, accompanying Bramer’s drawing of a cooper (`kuiper’) |
| Code of occupational group |
81930 |
| Description |
A cooper stands in the square, with two wide, shallow wooden tubs in front of him. His raised right hand grasps an adze, which he will bring down onto the blunt end of the driver he uses to pound hoops into place around a large barrel.
This barrel will probably hold liquid, possibly beer or wine, because a bunghole has been left about a third of the way up for a tap. Slightly behind the cooper, an assistant with barrel hoops wrapped over his right shoulder watches the aproned cooper. Shaped barrel staves are scattered
on the ground. Behind the staves, a second man is walking with barrel hoops over his right shoulder. The scene is a town square, with buildings in the background and a man and dog some distance away ignoring the coopers. The coopers, however, are being carefully watched by a woman peering through a window with an opened wooden shutter.
Barrels were used to store foodstuffs, water, wine and beer, in addition to grain, seed, and oils; barrels were also used to ship goods on voyages or in carts. Wooden rain barrels, the terminus point in a system of leaders and gutters, were used to collect water cascading down rooftops. Coopers made wooden washtubs, milk pails, butter churns, cheese presses, shallow tubs for storing and displaying live fish in the markets, and deep wooden tubs used to preserve pork or beef meats in salt or brine for winter consumption. The brine barrel or "vleeschkuip" was an important element in pantry larders. Those barrels and buckets which held liquids had their staves more closely fitted so they would not leak the contents.
Jan Joris van Vliet's etching of the coopers also features an aproned cooper using an adze and driver. A second cooper shapes a barrel stave with a curved axe. Bramer sets his coopers out in the open air, where trees are in full leaf, unlike Jan van Vliet who set them to work in a shop or barn with more tools. Bramer has depicted at least one other cooper* quite similar to this drawing. It is a large 394x3ll mm sheet of blue paper with grey pen and ink and grey wash now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. There Bramer's cooper, working in a farmyard, is using the adze and driver to pound home barrel hoops around a large, upturned washtub. In 1694, Jan Luyken depicted the coopers as workers in his emblem book, het Menselyk Bedryf. While one of Luyken's coopers also uses a driver to fasten hoops around a barrel, another is heating and bending barrel staves in a trussing ring, a preliminary stage in the barrel-making process. |
| 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. |
| Notes |
*See: Zeichnungen des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, Vermachtnis Richard Jung, exhibition catalogue from Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 1989-90. |
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