| Title |
|
Haal vuijen (Search for the image) |
| Translated title |
Here's Onions |
| Intro |
Text by dr D. Barnes, accompanying Bramer’s drawing of an onionseller (`uienverkoper’) |
| Code of occupational group |
45220 |
| Description |
A man has a heavy wicker basket filled with onions. He balances the basket on his left shoulder with his arm and hand, while offering a braided strand of onions to an old woman seated at the left in a low chair. Buildings in the town can be seen behind them.
Onions were a common vegetable in Holland, used liberally for the flavor they imparted to meats, stews, fish, and chicken. Braiding the onion tops together made it easy to hang them up in kitchens for storage purposes and easy for the peddlers to sell them in units rather than by weight or individually piece by piece.
Braided onions can be seen in the wheelbarrow of vegetables pushed by the market woman in Michiel van Musscher's "Pig on a Ladder" (Amsterdam Historical Museum). They are also prominently displayed in the basket of fruits and vegetables sold by a market woman to a woman shopping with a little girl in Joachim Wttewael's "The Vegetable Woman" (Centraal Museum, Utrecht). A small bunch of onions whose tops have been braided together are included in A.E. van Rabel's "Still Life with Beer, Bread, Cheese, Onions, and Fish", taken as the mainstays of the Dutch diet, (Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent). A wandering peddler selling garlic and onions was included in the 1646 publication based on Carracci's work, folio 41. While onions were sometimes incorporated in Dutch kitchen scenes to allude to sexual lust, because of their presumed aphrodisiacal properties, no such implication seems evident in Bramer's peddler. |
| 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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