Interior of a Tavern by Adriaen Brouwer

Loosely painted in a palette of murky browns and greys, the interior of this smoking tavern, or tabagein, reveals a bawdy scene. Merging with the gloom, soft focus figures with raised flagons and tumblers populate the background. A patch of light in the foreground catches highlights of white linen that reveal a more detailed story. The conspiratorial pose of the man in the white shirt, busy adding tobacco to his pipe – smoking was a new activity in seventeenth-century Netherlands – is countered by the surly, open stare of his companion with his pipe in hand, the epitome of drunken bravura. A chalked tally on the stool marks the flagons of beer that they have consumed, while to the right a man is caught urinating against a post, the high tally a wry comment on his actions.

Depictions of peasant society and impropriety were popular with the Dutch and Flemish middle classes in the seventeenth century. The Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer (c.1605-38) was renowned for his humorous and moralising genre, or everyday, scenes, particularly his figures’ expressive faces, seen here in the wide variety of facial expressions and gestures of the tavern-goers. This interest in expressiveness is underscored by the drawing or print tacked above the fireplace, which resembles drawings of caricatured heads and faces by the Italian artist, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).