Smoker at an Inn, ca. 1659

About the Work

David Teniers specialised in genre painting and worked for a time at the court of the governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In an inn, a young peasant with a clay pipe looks out at the viewer rather morosely, while at the back of the taproom a group of peasants are enjoying a boisterous carousal. Although smoking and drinking were considered vices in the seventeenth century, here the moralising undertones compete with the painter’s obvious delight in crude anecdotal details, such as the urinating man on the left and the wryly caricatured faces.