Title   Droochscheerder (Search for the image)
Translated title Nap Shearer
Intro Text by dr D. Barnes, accompanying Bramer’s drawing of a nap shearer (`droogscheerder’)

Code of occupational group 75390
Description Two men are finishing woven fabric. A man with a soft cap stands holding a very large pair of nap shears in both hands. He trims off small fibers from a bolt of fabric so the nap will be smooth. The fabric is stretched flat on a table.

Behind the shearer, a bare-haired worker stands with his right arm raised so he can draw a teasel down the surface of a hanging length of fabric. The teasel will draw up shorter fibers from the woven surface so they can be trimmed. A wooden fabric storage chest is next to the wall behind the workmen. Seven additional teasels hang on two racks on the wall and a second pair of nap shears is suspended from a spike nailed into the wall.

Woven wool, saii, serge, worsteds and linens needed to be finished smoothly before these fabrics could be tailored into clothing. Specialists trimmed fabrics in every town where there was a weaving industry. Delft also had many fullers, who cleaned and shrunk loosely woven woolen fabric to tighten the weave, before it went to the dyers and the nap shearers.

In Van Vliet's etching of the nap shearers, the two workers stand behind one another using the shears, working in tandem. The teasels are on a rack and in a frame, rather than being used by a worker. Bramer's drawing actually provides more visual information about the labors involved. He draws the eye of the viewer diagonally upward from the flat surfaces of the stretched fabric and nap shears to the teasel in the raised hand of the second worker, thus animating the scene.

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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