Smokers in a tavern

Smokers in a Tavern of 1635, held in the Museo del Prado, captures David Teniers the Younger in the phase when tobacco-smoking was still a relatively recent cultural practice in Europe — introduced via Spanish America in the sixteenth century, it had become ubiquitous in the taverns and guardrooms of Northern Europe by the 1630s. The social ritual of smoking — the pipes passed between companions, the clouds of smoke filling low-ceilinged interiors, the drowsy contemplative quality smoking induced — provided genre painters with a subject that was simultaneously new and already thoroughly codified. Teniers and his near-contemporary Adriaen Brouwer both made tavern smoking a signature subject, though Teniers typically rendered his smokers in a warmer, less abrasive social register than Brouwer's raw peasant types. The early date of 1635 places this among Teniers's foundational explorations of the theme.

Panel with warm, smoke-hazy interior atmosphere. The challenge of rendering tobacco smoke — its translucent, shifting quality that obscures background forms while catching light — is met through thin, scumbled layers of grey-white paint over the warm ground. Pipe bowls glow with orange embers that provide points of warm colour against the cooler ambient light. Figures are organised in casual conversation groups, the composition less formally organised than Teniers's later works.