Travellers outside an Inn

Outside a country inn a mixed company takes its ease. Men sit or lie on the grass talking, a woman perched high on a wagon looks down at a beggar, and a crippled man pushes himself along the road on blocks of wood. The painter signed it at the bottom, Isack van Ostade, 1646, and that spelling of his name is the one the museum uses.

Later the panel passed through some of the grandest collections in Paris and London. It belonged to the collector Randon de Boisset, then to the Duc de Berry, and in 1837 Anatole Demidoff bought it. In 1868 the Marquess of Hertford paid 104,000 francs for it, and it went to his heir, Richard Wallace. Wallace's widow later exchanged it with Alfred de Rothschild for another Isack van Ostade, which is still in the Wallace Collection in London. The Mauritshuis bought this one in 1925.