Country Fair

A village fair is in full swing outside an inn. People eat, drink, dance and kiss, and on the left a man is being sick, the price of a long day of eating and drinking. Vinckboons wrote his name on the building itself, above the door on the right, and put the date under a window, 1629.

By then he had been painting country fairs in Amsterdam for more than 20 years, and he was the painter who had brought the subject to Holland. The Mauritshuis is frank about who these pictures were for. Well-off town collectors bought them to be amused by peasants and their pleasures.

The date makes this one of his last paintings. He died within the next few years, sometime between 1631 and January 1633, when his wife is first recorded as a widow. The Mauritshuis bought the panel in 1888 at an Amsterdam auction of the collection of S. B. Bos, a collector from Harlingen in Friesland.