Merry Company in a Brothel

In the 1620s and 1630s Haarlem painters turned out small, lively pictures of young people in fine clothes eating, drinking and flirting, and buyers enjoyed them as a show of fashion and a warning at the same time. Hendrik Pot's version leaves little doubt about where this party is taking place. A curtained bed opens behind the table, and among the richly dressed young women sits an older one in a plain headscarf, in pictures of this kind the procuress who runs the house. Pot put his initials, HP joined together, on the bed.

The panel is not dated. It is probably the picture sold in Amsterdam in 1794 as the work of Dirck Hals, Frans Hals's younger brother and the best-known Haarlem painter of such parties. It belongs to the Mauritshuis, which bought it in 1883, and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V.