A Festive Company

A chair lies knocked over in the foreground. On the table a pastry has been broken open among bowls of berries, a jug, plates and glasses, and the young man at the centre holds his glass upside down, empty. Around him sit a woman with a lapdog, an older man holding a sheet with a song or a poem, and a lute player on the right, while the standing man and woman at the right may be a betrothed couple. Two pictures hang on the wall behind them.

Merry companies of well-dressed young people eating, drinking and making music were a fashion in Dutch painting of the 1620s, and viewers at the time often looked at them with the moralists' warnings against idleness and drink in mind. This panel is dated 1629. It came to the Rijksmuseum in 1898 in the bequest of Daniel Franken, an Amsterdam collector.