Peasant Inn

Adriaen Brouwer specialized in tavern scenes showing peasants drinking, smoking, playing cards, and arguing. Born around 1605, he worked in both Flanders and the Dutch Republic during the first half of the 17th century. Though he lived only about 33 years, his small body of roughly 60 paintings influenced generations of artists.

Brouwer shifted peasant genre scenes, a theme pioneered by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from outdoor settings to tavern interiors. His figures quarrel, gamble, and argue among themselves, their facial expressions revealing rage, disgust, joy, and pain in varying degrees. This focus on expression contributed to the development of "tronies," or head studies that investigate varieties of emotion.

These scenes served a moral purpose for the wealthy townsmen who purchased them: examples of how not to behave. Peter Paul Rubens owned seventeen Brouwer paintings, and Rembrandt also collected his work. Brouwer's principal followers included the Dutch painter Adriaen van Ostade and the Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger. The Bredius Museum in The Hague holds this genre painting.