The Smoker

When this small panel was painted, around 1660, tobacco was still a fairly recent arrival in the Dutch Republic, a fashionable habit barely two generations old and one that many moralists distrusted. Steen gives us a single man enjoying it: seated in profile at a table, in a reddish-brown coat and dark red cap, tamping his pipe with a faint, contented smile. The Dutch title calls him de pijpstopper, the pipe-stopper, and pairs it with het gevoel, the sense of feeling, which sets the picture inside the old tradition of painting the five senses one figure at a time. A quieter idea is folded into the pleasure. In 17th-century painting, curling pipe smoke was a familiar emblem of how quickly life passes, thin and gone in a moment. Here Steen keeps it light, the man simply savouring the first slow draw.