Merry Company on a Terrace

This was painted during the Twelve Years' Truce, the pause in the Dutch war against Spain that ran from 1609 to 1621. A generation of well-off young people in the Dutch towns suddenly had money, peace and time, and Buytewech was among the first painters to build pictures around them doing nothing in particular. Couples sit at a loaded table on a terrace in the latest fashions, with dogs on the floor in front. Who is paired with whom is left unclear, and that is the joke. His contemporaries called him Geestige Willem, witty Willem. He died in 1624 in his early thirties, and only six of his paintings of young people at leisure are known, which is why the Mauritshuis in The Hague moved on this one when it came on the market in 2018. It had spent nearly 60 years before that hanging in Berlin as a loan from a private family.