Drinking Bout in a Tavern

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).³ 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.⁴ Bullart also states that he was born in Oudenaarde which would substantiate references in the 1640s⁵ and in 1662⁶ 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 1613.⁷

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.⁸ 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,⁹ 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.¹⁰ Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) attested on 4 March 1632 that he had bought a Peasant Dance from Brouwer about a year previously.¹¹ 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,¹² and his work was being copied as early as 1632.¹³

But by October 1632 he was in debt; an inventory of his possessions shows his exiguous circumstances.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ In May 1634 he became a lodger with the engraver Paulus Pontius (1603-1658) in the Everdijstraat.¹⁶ In 1634/35, with Pontius, he joined the rederijkerkammer, De Blom Violiere, and renewed his membership the next year.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ The rubric beneath his portrait in Van Dyck’s Iconography described him as ‘Gryllorum Pictor’ (painter of comic figures).¹⁹ His paintings were collected by both Rubens²⁰ and Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-1669), who also owned drawings by him.²¹ 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.²² 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;²³ 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