Drunken Peasants at an Inn

In March 1625 Adriaen Brouwer, a Flemish painter of about 20, was lodging in Amsterdam at an inn kept by another Flemish painter, Barend van Someren. He also spent time in Haarlem, and this small panel comes from those Dutch years, around 1625 or 1626. Nobody in the room is sober. A woman in a red skirt has passed out and slid off her stool onto the floor. A man in a barrel chair laughs with a clay pipe in his hand, his neighbour raises a jug with his mouth hanging open, and a heavy man in a red cap leans against the wall with his eyes half shut. Brouwer brought scenes like this to the Dutch Republic, and his buyers were prosperous townspeople who found peasant manners very funny. His monogram, AB, once stood on the barrel chair and is no longer visible.