| Title |
|
Schoelappen (Search for the image) |
| Translated title |
Cobbler |
| Intro |
Text by dr D. Barnes, accompanying Bramer’s drawing of a cobbler (`schoenlapper’) |
| Code of occupational group |
80130 |
| Description |
A cobbler sits on a three-legged stool in the open air. His hat and other objects, including a tool bag, are piled onto the ground near him. He has a strap over his left knee held in place by his left foot. The strap clamps down a shoe he is repairing. He draws a thread through the sole of the shoe using both hands to pull the stitches tight. One repaired shoe lies on the ground in front of him. A second man, wearing a hat, with a cloth bag slung over his shoulder, carries a three-legged stool under his left arm; he passes by and observes the cobbler. He is probably also an itinerant cobbler. In the background there is a large building with a thatched roof. Someone sits in front of it having a conversation with a standing man leaning on a stick. Billowy clouds and trees in leaf suggest warm weather.
Shoes and boots were sold to men and women who brought them back to the cobbler for mending when the soles had worn out. Some cobblers had shops located in the cellar or first floor of a dwelling; some cobblers had regular locations in the market place to repair shoes; and occasionally itinerant cobblers traveled from village to village fixing, but seldom making, shoes.
While shoes and slippers were needed by most adults and children living in the Netherlands, poorer people were more likely to have their footwear cobbled often, frequently with patches to the uppers, and wealthy people might replace worn heels and soles but not keep the shoes once the uppers had become damaged. Military men who wore large cuffed leather boots had special shoe repair needs.
In Jan van Vliet's account of a shoemaker's shop, one cobbler cuts a piece of leather, while a second seated one also uses the strap to position a shoe to which he is sewing a sole. Tools are on the floor, and finished boots and leather straps hang on the wall. The shoemaker's use of the strap was a motif in Jost Amman's woodcut (1568) and in the paintings of other Dutch artists; see, for example, Jan Victors' "A Village Scene with a Cobbler" (National Gallery, London) or Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam's "Shoemaker and Woman at a Spinnning Wheel" (Brod Gallery, London). Brekelenkam returned to the image of the shoemaker no less than 14 times. Jan Luyken's cobbler in het Mendelyk Bedryf also works outdoors with a variety of tools used to sew a shoe together while his young apprentice reels stout thread for his master. In Adriaen van Ostade's etching of the cobbler, the workman is shown in the window of his "pothuis" shop talking to a customer who is seated outdoor smoking a pipe while the cobbler makes the finishing touches on the repair job. |
| 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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