Interior of a tavern with woman smoking and man offering her a drink with an old woman looking on

David Teniers the Younger's interior scene of a woman smoking and a man offering a drink while an old woman looks on (c. 1660) exemplifies his mastery of Flemish low-life genre painting. Teniers was Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's court painter and keeper of his picture gallery in Brussels, yet he devoted much of his prodigious output to scenes of peasants and tavern figures derived from Dutch precedents. These scenes were enormously popular with the aristocracy precisely because they offered an idealized, picturesque version of common life — raucous but not threatening, a source of comfortable amusement. The work is now in São Paulo's Ema Klabin collection.

Teniers's small cabinet format suits his intimate genre subjects. The figures are characterized with his typical quick intelligence — facial expressions of pleasure, complicity, and suspicion captured in confident brushwork. The warm, smoky interior light is built up in brown and amber tones that Teniers manages with great subtlety.