Title   Metselaar (Search for the image)
Translated title Bricklayer
Intro Text by dr D. Barnes, accompanying Bramer’s drawing of a bricklayer (`metselaar’)

Code of occupational group 95120
Description Two bricklayers are working together. The one at the right, wearing a tall, wide- brimmed hat, is laying bricks for a wall. A wooden fraine has been left for the window. He holds a trowel in his right hand and sets the brick in place with his left. There is a small tub of mortar on the ground by his right foot. The man on the left, wearing a soft cap, walks towards the bricklayer carrying a wooden hod filled with mortar on his right shoulder. Behind him is a pile of sand with rake and shovel he has used to mix the mortar. The heaviness of the hod-carrier's load is indicated by the position of his feet and his bent knees. The man laying the bricks bends his knees, so he can make the wall bricks level. There is a rather haphazard pile of loose bricks for the bricklayer's use next to the wall.

Construction occurred at a rapid pace in the Netherlands during the 17th century. The population grew. Increased prosperity meant more houses, warehouses, and shops were built. Municipal weigh-houses, town halls, almshouses, orphanages, hospitals, and old folks homes were also constructed. Because wood was not plentiful in Holland and had to be imported from Baltic, Scandinavian, or German lumberyards, because wood was subject to fire and bricks were more durable, and because there was plenty of clay, sand, and straw in the Netherlands to make bricks, town after town passed requirements that new construction be done in brick. Delft bricklayers, along with the slaters, belonged to the gild of St. Laurence.

Van Vliet's etching of the bricklayer also features two men working with bricks. His hod carrier is mixing mortar to load onto the hod near a larger and neater pile of bricks, rather than carrying the mixed mortar. And there is not only framing for the window, but also for a door that guides the way the bricks are laid. Both van Vliet and Bramer's bricklayers use a trowel in similar ways, and face in the same direction, with wooden tubs of mortar near their feet.

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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