Peasants Smoking in an Inn

Peasants Smoking in an Inn of ca. 1640 belongs to the Teniers category of low-life interior scenes that had their ultimate origin in Adriaen Brouwer's brutally frank observations of peasant debauchery, which Teniers refined and elevated into a more genial, palatably decorative genre. Smoking was a relatively new habit in seventeenth-century Europe — tobacco had only been widely available in the Low Countries since the early seventeenth century — and the inn smoker carried complex connotations of modernity, vice, and democratic fellowship. Teniers gives his smokers a characteristic warmth and humour that distinguishes them from Brouwer's more sardonic vision. The still-life elements in such compositions — pipe, tobacco, mug, earthenware — receive meticulous attention, linking the genre scene to the Dutch still-life tradition.

Teniers employs his standard inn-scene format — two or three figures in close-up against a roughly plastered wall, lit from one side with warm amber light. The earthenware vessels and smoking implements are painted with precise still-life attention, while the faces are characterised with rapid but acute gestural brushwork.