Smokers in a tavern

Adriaen Brouwer's Smokers in a Tavern, held in the National Museum in Warsaw, belongs to the small but powerful body of work that established this short-lived Flemish painter as one of the most uncompromising observers of low-life pleasures in seventeenth-century painting. Brouwer (c. 1605–1638) lived a bohemian existence in Antwerp after training with Frans Hals in Haarlem, and his subjects — peasants drinking, smoking, gambling, receiving painful medical treatment — were drawn from direct experience of the marginal urban world he inhabited. His smokers are quite different from Teniers's: where Teniers shows smoking as a companionable social activity, Brouwer depicts it as an almost solitary absorption, figures rendered in states of stupor or physical sensation that blur the boundary between pleasure and insensibility. Rubens and Rembrandt both collected Brouwer's paintings, a remarkable testimony to the respect this radical genre painter commanded among the greatest artists of the age.

Oil on panel with the raw, economical technique Brouwer developed — working grounds used as mid-tone, lean paint dragged across the surface with decisive strokes, minimal glazing. The smoke-filled interior atmosphere is evoked through tonal rather than descriptive means: broad areas of warm brown suggesting walls, a concentrated light that picks out faces and pipes, everything else absorbed into shadow. The result is immediate and visceral rather than decorative.