The Knife Grinder

In 1662 Caspar Netscher was a young painter newly settled in The Hague, and that year the city's painters' society, Pictura, admitted him as a member. The same year he painted this knife grinder. Grinders went from street to street with their wheel, sharpening knives and scissors for anyone who would pay, and they were a familiar sight in Dutch towns. Here the man bends over his grinding wheel, with a second figure half lost in the shadows behind him. From that year too comes Netscher's Lace Maker, now in the Wallace Collection in London, a single young woman absorbed in her work. Both pictures show one person doing one ordinary job, and in Turin the label calls this one an arrotino ambulante, an itinerant grinder.