Merry Company Dining and Making Music

In 1632 the clay pipe was still a fairly new habit in Holland. Tobacco had come in with sailors and soldiers only a few decades before, and by now smoking belonged to the fashionable life that pictures like this one show. Anthonie Palamedesz put a smoker at the very centre of his party. The elegant man in the middle turns to look straight out at us as he breathes out a stream of pipe smoke. Around him the guests eat, drink and make music, and even the servant on the left, filling the beer glasses, is dressed in the fashion. The painter signed and dated the panel at lower left. The Mauritshuis bought it in 1900 for 3,000 guilders, with help from the Rembrandt Association, a society set up to keep Dutch art in the country.