Poor Folk Drinking in a Tavern, Adriaen Brouwer, c. 1625 - c. 1630 – (Adriaen Brouwer) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Adriaen Brouwer

Date: 1630

Technique: Oak

Irrespective of the indistinct initial, bottom left, there is no reason to doubt Adriaen Brouwer’s authorship of the present painting; indeed, it has never been questioned. The work has been generally dated to the artist’s first period of activity in Haarlem circa 1625-30.26 But whether the inscription is a monogram (as was believed in 1887), or, as here proposed, an initial B, and whether it is authentic, is hard to determine beneath the discoloured varnish which obscures the handling and range of colours. The treatment of the faces in the present work is less caricatural than in the Peasant Feast in the Ruziscka Foundation (Kunsthaus, Zürich),27 and the handling is more fluent than in the Tavern Yard with a Game of Bowls (private collection).28 Knuttel placed it in the artist’s later years in Holland, and earlier than his Card Fight outside a Country Tavern (SK-A-65).29 The development of Brouwer’s style in Haarlem has not been satisfactorily established. It may well be that the present painting should indeed be placed earlier than the fighting scene of circa 1628-30, but a more precise dating would be premature while both works are obscured by discoloured varnish, especially the former. The two sleeping figures in the foreground were perhaps inspired by, or painted in emulation of, those in the foreground of the print by Pieter van der Heyden (c. 1530-after 1572) after Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Fat Kitchen of 1563.30 But Brouwer’s subject is rather the effects of alcohol. At about the same time he treated the same subject, but in a different way, in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Interior of an Inn,31 in which there also appears a prone drinker and one with both arms raised. In his near-contemporary Peasant Interior (Staatliches Museum Schwerin),32 the woman on the left has a white headdress, but it remains done up as opposed to that of the stupefied mother in the foreground of the present picture, which has fallen undone. The headdress of the woman singing has also become undone; she may have been the same model who had appeared earlier, pouring a flagon, in the Ruziscka Foundation’s Peasant Feast. The motif of the point of a knife stuck in a table top recurs in Brouwer’s Personification of Envy, known through Lucas Vorsterman I’s (1595-1675) print.33 For a discussion of the popularity of smoking at the time, see SK-A-4040. Gregory Martin, 2022