Vrouwen met mand en schaal met kersen 1696 - 1748

Curator: Romeyn de Hooghe's print, titled "Women with Basket and Bowl of Cherries," believed to be created sometime between 1696 and 1748, offers an interesting scene of daily life, now held here at the Rijksmuseum. What are your initial impressions? Editor: It strikes me as surprisingly busy. The cross-hatching suggests an abundance of material things: textiles, the fruit itself, and the infrastructure of trade evidenced in the background. It’s an interesting rendering of commerce. Curator: The scene presents an opportunity to examine societal roles. We have a woman receiving cherries, a child seated with a basket, and a male figure offering the fruit. How do you see the labor and the power dynamics unfolding in this image? Editor: Immediately, I think of the means of exchange – who controls the flow of goods. The woman accepting the cherry seems to be making a careful assessment. Perhaps of quality, but perhaps also of price, engaging with both immediate pleasure and the system it enables. There is also an important visual contrast in what each is doing, since the person selling them is shown bending while the woman is shown sitting and elevated by a wall. Curator: The setting seems both pastoral and subtly constrained, doesn’t it? There’s a walled structure beside them, trees in the background, figures that seem sketched without regard for realism and scale in the background. This period saw increased interest in depicting everyday life but also using art as a tool for political commentary, so I always wonder about these prints as snapshots. Editor: That's a compelling point about the blend of pastoral and controlled space. De Hooghe's background and landscapes seem secondary to his focus on the labor required for resource exchanges, which makes the relationship to consumption even more complex and critical to examine. Curator: Indeed. Examining prints like these offers us a glimpse into the negotiations of social and economic values of the time, represented through something as simple as the sale and exchange of fruit. Editor: A deceptively simple scene revealing a complex system of social exchange through careful engravings of accessible material.