Peasants at an Inn

Three men share a table in an untidy village inn. One leans forward to light his pipe, the man opposite lifts his glass, and a third bends over his fiddle to tune it. Van Ostade signed and dated the panel in 1662, low on the right. Its later life is a small record of what such scenes were worth. At a sale in The Hague in 1713 it fetched 350 guilders. It then went to a Delft collector, Franco van Bleyswijck, and through his heirs to the Van Slingelandt family, who had it valued at 300 guilders in 1734 and at 790 in 1761, more than twice as much. Seven years later the whole Van Slingelandt collection was sold in one lot to Prince William V, who was 20 at the time, and these three peasants moved with it into the stadholder's pictures in The Hague.