Fighting Peasants

A card game outside a village inn has turned into a brawl. Cards lie on the table and on the ground, a young man holds a knife while a woman grabs his wrist, and at the table another man already has a fist in his hair. A pig and a dog carry on beside the bench. Brouwer painted it around 1625 or 1626, and from the 18th century the panel can be followed sale by sale. In 1738 it was sold in Brussels to Willem Lormier, a collector in The Hague, and when his pictures were auctioned in 1763 it went to Adriaan Leonard van Heteren, another Hague collector. In 1809 Louis Napoleon, Napoleon's brother and then King of Holland, bought the whole Van Heteren collection for his new Royal Museum in Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum still owns the picture and has lent it to the Mauritshuis since 1954.