ethnic tourism

Will these wooden busts, so vulnerable to decay, soon be nothing but museum exhibits? Probably not. Steps have been taken to safeguard the last representatives of this applied art form.

In days gone by these gapers hung on the shop fronts of herb doctors in Holland. The “big mouths” disrespectfully yawned at passers-by and often put out their tongues at them. The oldest reference to gapers-which means yawners in Dutch as well as English-dates back to 1584 in Rotterdam.

City and country folk were generally illiterate, so merchants, shopkeepers, craftsmen and hawkers would use all sorts of tricks and gimmicks, as well as the easily-recognisable symbols of their trades, to attract passers-by.

Kruiden dokters (herb doctors) and kruiden verkopers (herbalists) often used well-built Moorish-looking assistants in Oriental garb, as well as jesters, who, on fair and market days, would entertain the crowd and draw the audience’s interest to the drugs, herbs and spices imported from the fabulous East which the quack was peddling. To win over any reluctant customer,one can well imagine the conman putting out his tongue and swallowing (or at least pretending to do so) one of those miraculous pills, much to the amusement of the public.

When these itinerant drug-sellers finally dropped anchor and established permanent businesses they kept their association with these persuasive pill-poppers by hanging wooden busts of them on their shop-fronts. Traders in spices and herbs did the same.

The oldest designs had a strong oriental character and they generally represented a turbaned, moustachioed Moor’s head, with its mouth wide open (the oldest existing one dates from 1693 and it originates from Middleburg).

They often had around their necks a string of red beads symbolising poppyheads, the most ancient medicine known to man. Some clenched between their teeth yellow sticks of sulphur-regarded as a laxative and a sudorific-or cinnamon to treat typhoid and cholera. When black, they were of liquorice (which traditional medicine speaks highly of in the treatment of asthma, bronchitis and stomach sores). Some had a pill or two on their protruding tongue.

In the eighteenth century, nearly all the chemists’ shops used the gaper to herald their trade and it is believed those with a protruding tongue identified dokters, while those with a pill or two on it indicated dispensing chemists.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century many of them, who prepared drugs for other chemists, doctors and surgeons in their shops, were denied licences and had to close. Their gapers lost their purpose and were often taken down.

But many remained in every Dutch town and village. There were so many of them that a tax of 10 guil ders, known as “precario” rights, was levied on each of them, which put an abrupt stop to further development.

In the1920s the tax was raised to 50 guilders (a fairly large sum in those days) and many druggists took their gapers down, put them on a shelf inside their shop, or dumped them.

In the early 1970s, the Dutch Committee for National Monuments drew up an inventory of the remaining antique gapers. In 1980, three gaper aficionados toured the country listing as many of them as they could find. They came up with 82-fewer than two-thirds of those previously recorded. The figure today must be far fewer.

These arresting “yawners” are now protected as national monuments and cannot be reshaped, altered or even repainted without official approval.

They would be even more rare but for the forethought of a Haarlem pharmacist, Mr A.J.M. Van Os. In the late 1920s, when the Dutch hardly gave any thought to their monumental heritage, he began buying them from colleagues who were unwilling, or unable, to cough up 50 guilders a year.

Over about 40 years he collected a trove of them. His private collection consisted of some 60 pieces. Most were made of wood, some of papier mache and a few carved in stone. This collection has now been given by his widow to the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen.

The Boerhave Museum in Leiden, devoted to the history of pharmacy in the Netherlands, as well as the Waagebouw, on the Nieuwmarkt in central Amsterdam, which houses the Medical and Pharmaceutical Museum, also have a few old gapers though not all are on display.

Some individuals have taken the gapers’ future into their own hands. In 1945, Klaas Dalmeyer settled down as a pharmacist in Hilversum. There were no gapers around for him to hang on the facade of his shop “de Aspirine’-the only ones he could lay his hands on were either too decayed or too highly-priced. Nowadays the very few gapers on sale in antique shops fetch anything up to 15,000 guilders (more than US$7000).

So he decided to try making them. His first attempt was disappointing, but those which followed were more like the real thing. For the past 35 years he has been cutting tree trunks, in his spare time, and turning them into “big mouths”.

The other comforting thought is that the gapers still hanging on shop facades throughout the country are there to stay, no matter what trade is being carried on in the premises.

Download zip format of these pictures through this link below:
Download Here