A peasant family making merry in a barn

One of the foremost genre painters of seventeenth-century Holland, Adriaen van Ostade is recorded as having started his career as a pupil of Frans Hals in Haarlem, concurrently with Adriaen Brouwer. It was from these two artists, and from Brouwer in particular, that Van Ostade first developed his themes of raucous parties of smoking, drinking and dancing peasants in their village surroundings for which he is best known. 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 chiaroscuro stronger. Prof. dr. Schnackenburg, to whom we are grateful, dates the present lot slightly earlier, to circa 1633-35 (on the basis of a photograph). Here, Van Ostade draws the attention to the children in the foreground, playing a wild game, in a lit part of the interior.