Zes markttaferelen 1814 - 1839

Pieter Roosing made these six market scenes with pen and watercolour, sometime in the early 19th century in the Netherlands. At first glance, the composition might remind us of a page from a child’s book. But it also represents an encyclopedic impulse to document the varieties of commercial exchange in the urban landscape. These little vignettes are full of telling details that can illuminate the social world of the Netherlands at the time. What kinds of goods are being traded? What are the respective social roles of buyers and sellers? What spaces and customs govern their interactions? Roosing seems interested in the theater of economic life, in the roles that people play in the marketplace. His work asks: what kinds of values are put on display? To understand these images better, we can look to historical documents. These range from municipal regulations of public markets to visual records of city life from the period. By bringing such sources to bear, we can begin to reconstruct the social meanings of this marketplace as Roosing understood it.