Fröhliche Gesellschaft

His contemporaries nicknamed Willem Buytewech 'Witty Willem', and he was among the first Dutch painters to build a whole subject out of well-dressed young people eating, drinking and flirting. He made this around 1618, during the truce that briefly halted the long war with Spain, when a confident merchant class in the young Dutch Republic finally had money and leisure to spend on display. The fashionable clothes, the easy poses and the sidelong glances were all part of the appeal for buyers who recognised themselves in the scene. Only about eight of his paintings survive at all, because Buytewech died in 1624, still in his early thirties.