Fair on St Sebastian's Day

When Jacob Savery moved from Flanders to Amsterdam around 1590, the village fair was a Flemish subject hardly known in Holland, and he was one of the painters who brought it north. Here a church stands ringed with stalls on its saint's day. Under the lean-to of a yellow house some villagers are drinking, and upstairs, at an open window, a couple is courting. On the flagpole a large pennant shows St Sebastian, the saint the fair is held for. The panel is signed Jaq.s. Savery at lower right, though the museum allows that his studio may have had a hand in it. It was given to the Mauritshuis in 1874 by Arnoldus Andries des Tombe, the Hague collector who later left the museum Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.