Peasant Inn

Two signatures sit close together at the left of this panel, near the seated woman. One reads Av. Ostade, the other Corn: dusart. For a long time the Ostade signature was taken for a fake. The Mauritshuis now credits the painting to both men, Adriaen van Ostade, Haarlem's leading painter of peasant life, and Cornelis Dusart, his pupil, and dates it simply after 1680. When Ostade died in 1685, Dusart took over his studio with its unfinished pictures and completed some of them. The panel itself does not say which of the two began it and which finished it.

The room is a crowded village inn under heavy beams. A fiddler plays beside an old woman holding a sheet of paper, a laughing man sprawls on a bench, and further back men smoke, drink and play cards, while a small child and a dog have the open floor in front. The Mauritshuis bought the panel in 1877 through the Paris dealer Léon Gauchez for 3,000 guilders, and shows it in the Gallery Prince Willem V.