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Mascall Mill Buy
A Better Mousetrap · Part 13 of 30

The Dutch paint one, 1660

Act III: Four hundred years of resetting ·

Listen · 2 min

Card for part 13 of A Better Mousetrap: Quiringh van Brekelenkam's 1660 painting The Mousetrap. A boy in a broad brown hat leans over a table, pointing at a small wooden box trap with barred sides, his other hand on the lever on top of it. A younger child rests a chin on the table and peers at the trap.
Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam, The Mousetrap, 1660. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-62. Public domain.

Part 12 was a mousetrap with no door at all: a play. Part 13 is the opposite, a real one, on a table, painted.

A small picture

In 1660 Quiringh van Brekelenkam signed a panel “Q.B. 1660.” He worked in Leiden, painting tailors’ and cobblers’ shops and ordinary rooms. This one is 18.5 by 16.5 centimetres, smaller than a sheet of printer paper. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has it, and its description is one sentence: two children with a mousetrap in which a mouse has been caught.

The older boy, in a broad brown hat, grins and points at the trap. A younger child rests their chin on the table edge, peering in. The trap is a wooden box with barred sides. On top, a post holds a lever, and a thread runs from the lever down to the box.

Everyone painted one

He wasn’t alone. Boys with mousetraps “enjoyed great popularity among Dutch painters” of the late 1600s and early 1700s, as one catalogue puts it. Gerrit Dou, also in Leiden, painted one in the late 1640s. Dominicus van Tol painted a boy holding up a trap by candlelight. Adriaen van der Werff painted another about twenty years later.

A Dutch buyer in 1660 could also read a trapped mouse in the emblem books of the day. In 1627 Jacob Cats printed a mouse in a trap, going for the bacon, under the motto Fit spolians spolium: who takes the plunder becomes the plunder. His book even gave the English:

Like as the silly mouse, the bayte of bacon to obtaine, And catchinge it is caught her selffe

Cats meant a lover stealing a kiss. Whether Brekelenkam meant anything at all is another matter: one catalogue says his scenes “refrain from explicit symbolism”. It may just be two children and a mouse.

The hand on the lever

The scholars who edited Cats’s book online call his a well-known, popular trap that catches the animal alive. The mouse goes in for the bait, and the trap shuts on it.

Then look at the older boy’s other hand. It’s on the lever. Nothing in that box opens, empties or sets itself. A person does it, every time.

Our simplified drawing of a box trap like the one in the painting: a wooden box with barred sides, a post on the lid, and a lever with a thread down to a door at the open end. A mouse walks in to the bait, the door drops shut and the lever tips up: Shut. One mouse. Then a hand comes down and presses the lever, and the door rises again: Nothing resets until a hand does it.

That’s the problem this whole series keeps coming back to. Seventy years earlier, in part 11, Mascall’s mill turned a quarter of the way round after each mouse, and the next baited vane was already in place. Nothing had to be set again. The painted trap waits for a child.

Next, part 14: Under the floor, 1700s.

Sources

  1. Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam, The Mousetrap (De muizenval), 1660, oil on panel, 18.5 × 16.5 cm, signed "Q.B. 1660.", Rijksmuseum SK-A-62, public domain: rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-62 . Museum description: "Twee kinderen met een muizenval waarin een muis gevangen is." Image: Wikimedia Commons, File:De muizenval, SK-A-62.jpg.
  2. Piet Bakker, "Quiringh van Brekelenkam", The Leiden Collection Catalogue (2017): born 1622, Leiden Guild of Saint Luke from February 1648, "thought to have died shortly after 1668", painter of "the shops of tailors and cobblers": theleidencollection.com/artists/quiringh-van-brekelenkam/ .
  3. RKD Studies, Dulwich Picture Gallery catalogue, Quiringh van Brekelenkam: "households, workshops and peasant interiors"; his scenes "refrain from explicit symbolism": dulwich-picture-gallery-i.rkdstudies.nl/brakenburgh-calraet/quiringh-van-brekelenkam/ .
  4. Junko Aono, Dominicus van Tol, A Boy with a Mousetrap by Candlelight, The Leiden Collection (2017): "Depictions of a boy with a mousetrap enjoyed great popularity among Dutch painters", with Brekelenkam's SK-A-62 in note 10: theleidencollection.com/artwork/a-boy-with-a-mousetrap-by-candlelight .
  5. Jacob Cats, Sinne- en minnebeelden (Middelburg, 1627), emblem 12, "Fit spolians spolium", with the book's own English verse, Emblem Project Utrecht: emblems.hum.uu.nl/c162712.html . Its note on the trap: "een bekende en populaire val, waarin het dier levend wordt gevangen".
  6. Gerrit Dou, The Mousetrap, 1645–50, Musée Fabre, Montpellier: utpictura18.univ-amu.fr/en/notice/22966-the-mousetrap-gerrit-dou .
  7. Adriaen van der Werff, A Boy with a Mousetrap, about 1678–9, National Gallery, London, NG3049: nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG3049 .