Visboer, met mand op de rug 1793 - 1835

François Joseph Pfeiffer made this print of a fish seller with etching sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. Consider what it meant to depict the laboring classes in the Netherlands at this time. Before the advent of modern refrigeration and transportation, the work of a fishmonger was hard physical labor. Here, Pfeiffer shows us the hunched posture of a worker weighed down by his trade. The print is small, modest even, but it captures the everyday reality of working people. We might ask ourselves: What does it mean to enshrine this figure in art? Prints like this one were part of a growing visual culture that took the lives of ordinary people as its subject matter. By studying popular imagery from the era, we can learn much about the social and economic transformations underway, and how artists chose to represent them.