A seated man drinking from an earthenware tankard and holding a pipe

Like his master, Adriaen van Ostade, Cornelis Dusart spent his entire career in Haarlem specializing in scenes of peasant life. He made a large number of drawings showing drinking, smoking and music-making peasants. While most of Ostade's drawings are rather small and sketchy, Dusart's figure drawings tend to be larger, more worked out and drawn in different colored chalks, as is the case with the present sheet. It may be compared to a number of similarly executed figure drawings, including A young man lounging, smoking a pipe, previously in the I.Q. van Regteren Altena collection (sold Christie's, Amsterdam, 13 May 2015, lot 219), Study of a seated peasant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 40.91.13), and Seated man wearing a cap in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (inv. MB 338).