Interior with figures standing and seated near a table laden with food and drink

Jacob Duck’s interior scenes are characterised by their lively theatricality and the heightened realism with which each object is rendered. Here Duck plays a mischievous symbolic game with his characters that would have amused his contemporary viewers. We are presented with the end of a love affair; though the couple in the background are merrily drinking wine, the main characters rest sober, a play on the popular proverb sine Baccho friget Venus (‘love grows cold without wine’). Duck has also chosen to depict the woman holding a pipe, subverting the cultural norms of the time when smoking was essentially reserved for men. Coupled with her impulsive gesture, the implication is that she controlled the relationship and it was her choice to cast off her pensive lover.
The soldier resting his head on his hand on the left of the composition can be found in a signed oval painting by Duck in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1632-33; inv. no 1971.102; ibid., no. 27, plate VII). The landscape painting hanging on the wall behind also appears in another signed work by Duck (Nîmes, Musées d'Art et d'Histoire; see Salomon, op. cit., p. 155, no. 59, fig. 101), where it is flanked by interior scenes painted by Leonaert Bramer and Pieter Codde.