Men drinking and smoking in a barn

This is a characteristic tavern scene by Hendrick Martensz. Sorgh, the Rotterdam painter who is thought to have trained with David Teniers II but whose style was perhaps more informed by the work of Adriaen Brouwer. The seated smoking figure, who exhales while looking directly at the viewer, is certainly redolent of the characters who inhabit Brouwer’s pictorial world. The sophisticated still-life arrangement in the left half of the composition, crowded with an assortment of stoneware, copper pots and piled-up baskets, was a hallmark of his interior genre scenes and would become increasingly refined in his later compositions, in works such as The Lutenist, painted in 1661 and now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.