Visverkoper draagt vissen aan een juk

Mathias de Sallieth made this drawing of a fish seller carrying fish in a yoke sometime in the late 1700s. It’s now held in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The image is a window into the economic life of the Dutch Republic during the period known as the Dutch Golden Age. The Republic dominated international trade, and its cities were full of specialized merchants and vendors. Here we see one such figure, a fishmonger who would have been a common sight in the streets of Amsterdam or The Hague. What might the image suggest about the social structures of its time? The yoke allows the man to carry more fish and sell them further afield. This suggests an increasingly networked economy in which individual vendors had to compete for customers. To understand the image better, we could research the history of fishing and trade in the Netherlands. This image reminds us that art is always connected to broader social and institutional contexts.