Adriaen Brouwer

Adriaen Brouwer painted the parts of life that grand art left out, peasants brawling in smoky taverns, men pulling faces over foul-tasting medicine, card players about to come to blows. His pictures are small, loosely brushed, brilliantly done, and often very funny.

He led a short, disorderly life between Flanders and Holland, was briefly jailed in Antwerp, and died young, probably in his early thirties, possibly in an outbreak of plague. Yet the two greatest painters of the age took him seriously. Peter Paul Rubens owned more than a dozen of his pictures, and Rembrandt collected him too.

What they admired was the freedom of his brush and his feel for expression, a drunk's bleary eye, a wince of pain. He also painted a few quietly serious landscapes late on. For a man who died so young with so small an output, his hold over later Flemish and Dutch low-life painting was remarkably large.