Peasants Eating Mussels

Peasants Eating Mussels, an undated panel in Manchester Art Gallery, brings Brouwer's low-life observation to the subject of food consumption — a less frequently treated theme in his oeuvre than drinking and smoking but one that offered similar opportunities to study the absorption of figures in a sensory experience. Mussels were a standard item of cheap sustenance in seventeenth-century Flemish coastal and urban markets — food of the poor rather than the aspirational cuisine depicted in more refined still life and genre painting. Brouwer's peasants eating mussels are therefore doubly marked as belonging to the lowest social register, their food as unglamorous as their social position. Manchester Art Gallery, whose collection includes both the Brouwer tavern scene and this mussel-eating panel, holds two complementary studies in Brouwer's range of low-life subject matter.

Panel with the direct handling Brouwer brought to all his close-focused figure studies. Mussels as still-life objects — dark shells, pale flesh, the residue of briny water — require different textural treatment from the warm tones of human flesh and clothing. Brouwer handles the food as a functional object rather than a decorative still-life prop, its appearance unglamorised. The figures eating are observed in the unselfconscious postures of people absorbed in feeding — heads bent, attention focused on extracting flesh from shell.