The Topers (Boors Smoking in an Interior)

The Topers (Boors Smoking in an Interior), an undated work in the Dover Collections, brings together two of Brouwer's dominant subjects — tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption — in a combined interior scene. The figure of the toper who both drinks and smokes was a recognisable social type in early seventeenth-century Flemish urban life, the tavern's pleasures pursued simultaneously rather than sequentially. Brouwer's treatment refuses the comic distancing that other genre painters maintained between themselves and their low-life subjects: his smokers and drinkers are depicted with an empathy that suggests the painter's own participation in the pleasures he recorded. The Dover Collections, as a British art holding body, acquired this work within the long tradition of British appreciation for Flemish cabinet painting that goes back to the seventeenth-century courtly collecting of Charles I.

Panel with the interior warm atmosphere that smoking-and-drinking scenes demanded. The combination of tobacco haze and vapour from drinks requires Brouwer to manage multiple atmospheric conditions within a single space. Paint application maintains his characteristic directness: the scumbled smoke rendered in thin opaque layers, the warm amber glow of the interior in transparent ones. Figures are placed in the casual, unselfconscious postures of people absorbed in their pleasures rather than aware of being observed.