Peasants Gathered Round a Barrel

The later life of this little panel can be followed sale by sale, including two auctions at which nobody bought it. It was sold in Paris in 1881 with the collection of the Baron de Beurnonville and went through two more Paris sales by 1910. In 1918 Jacques Goudstikker, the leading old-master dealer in Amsterdam, exhibited it in The Hague and in Amsterdam, and in 1923 he sent it across the Atlantic to a New York show of his stock. Leopold Gellert of Prague may have bought it in the 1930s. His family left the city in 1938 and kept many of their belongings safe in England during the war.

Van Ostade painted it in the mid-1650s. Four men and a woman crowd round a barrel that serves as their table. One holds a jug, another bends over his drink with his back to us, the man behind him has an arm round the woman, and a fourth stands at the right with a glass. In 1985 and again in 1986 Gellert's daughter, Elinor Barber, offered the panel at Christie's in New York, and both times it went unsold. That June she gave it to the museum.