Il vino è un beffardo

Outside a Dutch inn a well-dressed young woman has drunk herself insensible, and two people are folding her into a wheelbarrow to cart her home. Her silk clothes and red stockings tell you she had status and money, and that is rather the point. Above the inn door Jan Steen lettered a line from the Book of Proverbs: wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whoever is deceived by it is not wise. He liked to show that respectable people were as prone to drink's disgrace as anyone, and that a fall from higher up was the harder one to watch. Steen would have known the world from the inside. For a time he leased a brewery and later kept an inn, painting these rowdy scenes from the people he served every day.