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Carpenter, cloth merchant, coal merchant, fish merchant and timber merchant. Sculptures representing these professions are placed by the Katwijk sculptor Gerard Brouwer in various places in the region: Hillegom, Leiden, Wassenaar, Katwijk. The timber merchant' from 1986 can be found on the bridge near Houtzagerssingel and Brouwersgracht in The Hague. Actually, Brouwers houthandelaar is more like a woodcutter. But the one does not exclude the other, certainly not in the past. For when wood merchant Coen Dekker established himself at the end of the 19th century at the now called Houtzagerssingel, he undoubtedly walked regularly with wood on his shoulder.
In 1985, the Dekker Hout company, which had started the business one hundred years earlier in the hofstad, celebrated an anniversary. On the occasion of this centenary, the company gave the neighbourhood and municipality a bronze statue of the timber merchant on a natural stone pedestal. Brouwer depicted more than just professions. In his oeuvre we also come across a man and a woman in a close embrace, a mother with a child at her skirts, musicians and riders on horseback. A long row of bronzes, which Onno Schilstra typified in the 'Leidsch Dagblad' of 17 October 1991 as: 'Cosy sculptures, which nobody can hate because they are made in an old-fashioned reliable way and have a cosy atmosphere'. That his images are pleasant to look at has two reasons: the subjects are recognisable and the style is sober and unaffected. Brouwer deliberately retains the traces of the modelled sculpture, which he later casts in bronze. Although the wood dealer is an exception, we usually do not see any detail in the face or on the hands and feet. Emotion can be read from the pose or a gesture.