Adriaen van Ostade was a Dutch painter and engraver. His work chiefly depicts lively genre scenes of peasants carousing or brawling in crowded taverns or barns. He lived and worked in Haarlem his entire life. He may have been apprenticed to Frans Hals together with Adriaen Brouwer. The latter’s influence is discernable in van Ostade’s early paintings. He continued to paint scenes of village life in taverns and domestic interiors throughout his career. He also painted the seamier side of life: disreputable lawyers, teachers and quacksalvers. Van Ostade held various positions in Haarlem’s artist guild and served in the civic guard. Indeed, he was highly productive, with over eight hundred paintings and a couple of hundred drawings and watercolours. He taught several pupils, among them his younger brother Isaack van Ostade, Cornelis Bega and probably also Jan Steen.

Today Adriaen van Ostade’s works are preserved in the most important museums worldwide, including the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, UK; the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Kunsthistorisches Museum Databank, Vienna; the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna; the Louvre Museum, Paris; the Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the National Gallery, London, UK; the Prado Museum, Madrid; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and many others.

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This newly discovered painting by Adriaen van Ostade represents one of the finest compositions of Adriaen van Ostade’s early work and can be dated to circa 1633 based on stylistic grounds such as the rendering of the figures and the composition. Following Brouwer’s influence, Ostade had initially adopted a satirical, almost caricatured, manner in his painting, but from the 1640s onwards he began to endow his low-life protagonists with increasing degrees of restraint and dignity, his palette becoming richer and his detail stronger.