Merry Company

Dutch moralists of the 1620s scolded the idle, wasteful life of the country's newly prosperous young, and this company, painted in Rotterdam in the last two or three years of Buytewech's short life, is full of what they complained about. Oyster shells lie scattered on the floorboards. The cavalier at the far left, under the big feathered hat, is holding a clay pot in front of himself and relieving himself into it, shielding the act with his hand. One later owner found that too much and had the pot painted out, so the hand seemed to rest on the back of a chair. Another, probably in the 19th century, covered the oyster shells and had the landscape on the back wall made a third smaller. All of it had been undone by the time the Berlin gallery bought the picture in 1926.