Revelry at an Inn

Something odd hangs from the balcony at the back of this crowded inn. It is a coat of arms with a motto, and it belongs to the emperor Charles V, who ruled Spain and the Netherlands in the 16th century. The Louvre suspects it was painted over another shield, that of a chamber of rhetoric, one of the amateur poetry and drama societies of Dutch towns, whose members seem to be gathered up on that gallery. The scholar Karel Braun went further and read the whole party as Leiden's yearly feast for the lifting of the Spanish siege of 1574. He pointed to the old pictures on the walls, among them the four sons of Aymon from medieval legend, as a nod to the four Nassau brothers who led the revolt against Spain. Others reject that reading firmly, and nobody has explained the leafy branches hung around the room. In the foreground Steen painted himself as a drinker beside his second wife, whom he married in 1673, both looking straight out at us. The picture later belonged to a burgomaster of Leiden, Jan van der Marck.