The Smokers

Tobacco had only reached Europe within living memory when Brouwer painted this around 1636 in Antwerp, and it still carried a whiff of scandal, smoked in taverns rather than parlours. The men crowded around the table are not strangers. Brouwer painted his own friends, fellow artists, and set himself at the centre, the one turning to face us while he lifts a jug and lets smoke curl from his open mouth. To their contemporaries a company like this doubled as a picture of the senses, taste and smell, and a gentle warning about hours wasted in idleness. Brouwer knew that world from the inside. He died in Antwerp in 1638, only a year or two after this, still in his early thirties and deep in debt.