Poor Folk Drinking in a Tavern

c. 1625 - c. 1630

Object data

oil on inlaid oak support

original support: height 18.7 cm × height 19.2 cm × width 25.6 cm
inlaid support: height 19.7 cm × width 27.6 cm

Inscriptions

inscription, indistinct, bottom left, on the barrel chair near the stoneware jar: ·B

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype / C. Wittop Koning, RMA, 25 September 2007
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 23 March 2010

Conservation

J.J. Susijn, 1982: revarnished
H. Kat, 1996: paint consolidated, revarnished

Provenance

…; ? collection Hendrik van Heteren (1672-1749), The Hague;¹ his son, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren (1724-1800), The Hague, (‘Eenige drinkende en zingende boeren en boerinnen, door Adriaan Brouwer. h. 9 en drie vierde d., br. 12 en drie vierde d. P. [25.4 x 33.3 cm]’);² his third cousin and godson, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren Gevers (1794-1866), Rotterdam, (‘Adriaan Brouwer. Plusieurs paysans buvant et dansant. Très bien peint, bois, h. 10 l. 12½ [26.2 x 32.7 cm]’);³ from whom, fl. 100,000, with 136 other paintings en bloc (known as the ‘kabinet van Heteren Gevers’), to the museum, by decree of Lodewijk Napoleon King of Holland, and through the mediation of his father, Dirk Cornelis Gevers (1763-1839), 8 June 1809;⁴ on loan to the Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1948-2002, and since 2003

Object number: SK-A-64

The artist

Adriaen Brouwer (Oudenaarde (?) 1603-05 - Antwerp 1638)

The genre and landscape painter, Adriaen Brouwer, or Adriaen de Brouwer, is best documented in the last eight years or so of his life which were spent in Antwerp. He was buried in the Carmelite monastery there on 1 February 1638. Isaac Bullart, in Peintres illustres du Pays Bas of 1682, states that he was thirty-two years old when he died; thus the year of his birth would be 1605 or 1606 (but see further below).⁵ His engraved portrait by Schelte Adamsz Bolswert (1584/1588-1659) after Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) for The Iconography, modelled probably in the early 1630s, shows the artist in his late twenties or so.⁶ Bullart also states that he was born in Oudenaarde which would substantiate references in the 1640s⁷ and in 1662⁸ to his being a Fleming, a view corroborated by recent research. It has placed his date of birth between 1603 and 1605, and provides evidence that he moved with his family to Gouda after 1613.⁹

Brouwer is first heard of in Amsterdam in 1626 when he witnessed a notarial deposition; he may have been living in the house of the deponent, the art dealer Barend van Someren, who was to own drawings by the artist.¹⁰ The following year a play was dedicated to the ‘richly artistic and famous young man, Adriaen Brouwer, painter of Haarlem’ (Den Constrijcken en Wijtberoemden Ionghman, Adriaen Brouwer, Schilder tot Haerlem). Houbraken states that he was apprenticed to Frans Hals (c. 1581-1666) in Haarlem,¹¹ for which there is no contemporary corroboration; but in fact he became a member also in 1626 of the Haarlem chamber of rhetoric, the Wijngaertrancken, and was to enrol in the city’s guild of St Luke. Paintings by him are confidently dated to around this time.

In the guild accounting year from September 1631 to September 1632, Brouwer was admitted to the Antwerp guild of St Luke.¹² Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) attested on 4 March 1632 that he had bought a Peasant Dance from Brouwer about a year previously.¹³ His reputation as an artist may have thus preceded him, as also in that year Jan Baptist Dandoy (active 1631-38) was enrolled as a pupil of Brouwer,¹⁴ and his work was being copied as early as 1632.¹⁵

But by October 1632 he was in debt; an inventory of his possessions shows his exiguous circumstances.¹⁶ In February a year later, he is recorded as incarcerated in the Antwerp Kasteel in which he may have remained until the spring of the following year.¹⁷ In May 1634 he became a lodger with the engraver Paulus Pontius (1603-1658) in the Everdijstraat.¹⁸ In 1634/35, with Pontius, he joined the rederijkerkammer, De Blom Violiere, and renewed his membership the next year.¹⁹ No mortuary fee was paid to the guild, so he may have died impoverished or more likely without relatives in Antwerp.

Renger has estimated Brouwer’s extant oeuvre at some sixty paintings; none is dated.²⁰ The rubric beneath his portrait in Van Dyck’s Iconography described him as ‘Gryllorum Pictor’ (painter of comic figures).²¹ His paintings were collected by both Rubens²² and Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-1669), who also owned drawings by him.²³ A further measure of his contemporary reputation may be estimated by a comparison of prices paid for his work with those for other masters; thus Arnold Lunden (d. 1656) paid 400 guilders for a Village Fête as against the 1,000 guilders that Rubens’s masterpiece The Farm at Laeken had cost him.²⁴ Campo Weyerman described Brouwer in his Levensbeschryvingen as the ‘Democritus of painters’ (Demokriet der Schilders) – Democrites being traditionally considered the ‘laughing philosopher’, laughing at human folly;²⁵ anecdotes arising from his scepticism are relayed by his early biographers. Some at least may have had a basis of truth.

REFERENCES
F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, pp. 847ff; J.H.W. Unger, ‘Adriaan Brouwer te Haarlem’, Oud Holland 2 (1884), pp. 161-69; G. Knuttel, Adriaen Brouwer: The Master and his Work, The Hague 1962, pp. 9-27; Jager et al. in K. Lichtert (ed.), Adriaen Brouwer, Master of Emotions: Between Rubens and Rembrandt, published to accompany the exhibition held at the MOU-Museum van Oudenaarde en de Vlaamse Ardennen, 2018, pp. 37-44

Entry

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

Literature

G. Knuttel, Adriaen Brouwer: The Master and his Work, The Hague 1962, pp. 87-89, figs. 46-49, col. pl. III, p. 190; Van Suchtelen in A. van Suchtelen et al., Genre Paintings in the Mauritshuis, coll. cat. The Hague 2016, no. 7

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 13, no. 55; 1843, p. 12, no. 52 (with no. 65) (‘Twee stuks vrolijke, drinkende en vechtende Boerengezelschappen’; ‘van een is het panel rondsome met stukken aangesat’); 1853, p. 17, no. 49 (fl. 1,000); 1858, p. 19, no. 42 (unknown); 1880, p. 74, no. 58 (24 x 31 cm); 1887, p. 26, no. 203 (as signed with monogram, 24 x 31 cm); 1903, p. 66, no. 641 (26 x 33 cm); 1934, p. 64, no. 641 (19.15 x 26.5 cm); 1976, p. 152, no. A 64

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Adriaen Brouwer, Poor Folk Drinking in a Tavern, c. 1625 - c. 1630', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6660

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