BROUWER, Adriaen

Brouwer’s earliest work must be placed around 1625-26. It stands out for its bright local colour, with noticeable accents of red and pink. The composition consists of a compact group in the foreground of a fairly large number of figures resembling Bruegelesque caricatures. The present open-air scene from these earliest years of Brouwer’s activity is marked by a lack of spatial integration of the group of figures. The furiously gesticulating figures stand in front of a landscape that only serves as a kind of background decor.

When Brouwer established himself in Antwerp after becoming a master there, he introduced the new style of genre, which had developed in Holland, to the Southern Netherlands, where such realistic and simply composed company pictures were not known. Brouwer’s work in Antwerp, including the Cardplayers in an Inn, is marked by an evolution towards a simpler colour palette, in which brownish and grey-green tones become dominant, so that the few local colour accents stand out all the more strongly.

The drunken peasant in the painting was the source for the cadaver in Rembrandt’s famous Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. In Rembrandt’s inventory of 1656 Brouwer was represented with seven or eight paintings.

Brouwer’s earliest work must be placed around 1625-26. It stands out for its bright local colour, with noticeable accents of red and pink. The composition consists of a compact group in the foreground of a fairly large number of figures resembling Bruegelesque caricatures. In indoor scenes, such as the Drunken Peasants, it is noticeable how little these compositions are integrated in their surrounding space.

The present painting depicts the interior of an inn with a group of drinking, smoking and singing peasants around a table. In the foreground a drunken woman has fallen asleep, a crying child pulls her arm. A peasant on the left sits on a barrel and stops a pipe, on the right side of the table another person lights his pipe.

Adriaen Brouwer, a Fleming who worked with Frans Hals in Haarlem, later went on to Antwerp, where he was much admired by Rubens, who collected many of his coarse, uncompromising scenes of peasant life. Surprisingly, Brouwer’s landscapes can have an almost Romantic quality, not that far from those of Rubens but sketchier and more in the modern manner, as in this Dune Landscape by Moonlight.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 16 minutes):

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor op. 27 No. 2 (Moonlight)

Brouwer’s preferred subjects were scenes of peasant life. He was especially interested in emotions and the facial expressions related to them. This scene of a village quack doctor operating on a patient offered him the opportunity to focus the message of the picture on the sensation of excruciating pain well-known to the beholder. There are no more than three people involved in the scene: the doctor, going about his task with a grim face, the patient, whose facial muscles are tightened into a grimace of pain, and a curious onlooker, who squeezes in between the two protagonists.

The peasant genre became prevalent in 17th-century Dutch painting. One of its earliest exponents was Brouwer, who in 1623-24 moved from Flanders to Haarlem, one of many immigrants drawn by the economic growth of the Dutch cities. He took up the Netherlandish tradition of depicting scenes from the life of common people that dates back to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymous Bosch.

Dutch realism was a matter not merely of imitative techniques but also of everyday themes: people and objects, houses and streets that might be found in the Republic. Comic paintings seem especially deliberate in their concern with thematic as well as pictorial realism. Like comedies, comic images in theory should depict people as they are, or even worse as they are. Painters fulfilled this requirement in paintings of down-to-earth, lowly themes, of peasants and burghers guzzling, drinking, laughing, dancing, and groping. In theme, these paintings recall comic texts and plays that linger on similar scenes and motifs rather than presenting a tight narrative. A painting of boors fighting by Adriaen Brouwer may seem uncommonly lifelike, with its violent action, gruff faces, poorly dressed peasants or urban dissolutes, and dishevelled tavern interior.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 26 minutes):

Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata BWV 212 (Bauernkantate)

This painting is one of the representations of smokers by Brouwer. Tobacco was still a novelty when Brouwer’s picture was painted, having been imported from the New World only since the late sixteenth century.

Born in Oudenaerde in Belgium, Adriaen Brouwer studied painting in Amsterdam, then Haarlem, where he came into contact with members of local rhetorical chambers, before settling in Antwerp. Admitted as a free master to the painters’ guild in 1632, he also became a member of the rhetorical chamber associated with it. He was popular with his Antwerp colleagues who repurchased his freedom - perhaps by acquiring certain of his paintings when he was imprisoned for debt.

Adriaen Brouwer specialised in depicting characters on the edge of society spending their time in licentious activities such as card-playing or alcohol and tobacco abuse. This debauched behaviour was looked down on by the members of bourgeois society who saw in it the confirmation of their own moral superiority. During his brief career Brouwer produced only a few dozen works, but revolutionised genre painting with his original synthesis between village scenes with a Bruegelian inspiration and Haarlem genre painting. His great pictorial mastery aroused the admiration of his peers, and painters and collectors like Rubens and Rembrandt owned several of his pictures.

Under the influence of early biographers, who attempted to draw parallels between the author’s work and his life, experts have sought to see in the background of the Seated Drinkers the wall of Antwerp citadel, then a jail, where the painter was imprisoned. This is, however, unlikely: the artist represented this type of rudimentary landscape several times over, with no link between the subject matter and his time behind bars. On the other hand, the finesse of this finely tempered little masterpiece has been rightly recognised from the outset. Here Brouwer has reached his full maturity. A few delicate red and yellow highlights are enough to enliven a composition largely dominated by subtly gradated browns and greys. If one needed to make a comparison between the painter’s life and his work, it would be between the artist’s untiring interest for theatre life and the very convincing way in which he succeeds in translating the psychological interplay of the figures.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Drinking song from the 16th century D 847, quartet

The peasant genre became prevalent in 17th-century Dutch painting. One of its earliest exponents was Brouwer, who in 1623-24 moved from Flanders to Haarlem, one of many immigrants drawn by the economic growth of the Dutch cities. He took up the Netherlandish tradition of depicting scenes from the life of common people that dates back to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymous Bosch.

The figures in Brouwer’s later pictures, produced after he had settled in Antwerp, are especially animated in gesture and expression, manifesting an unprecedented display of skill matched only by the sophisticated style in which they were painted. The Back Operation is an outstanding representative of Brouwer’s late style. The artist has intensified the monochromatic effects of his earlier works, rendering them in a higher key than previously, and he has reduced his composition to just three figures who proportionally occupy a significant area of the interior space.

Between c. 1625 and 1631 Brouwer stayed in Holland. The vivid brushwork which animates his little paintings and the portrait-like character of some of his genre pieces suggest that he had contact with Frans Hals. Returning to Antwerp he became one of the finest valeur painters of all times. His power of expression is also increased. The physiognomy and emotion in the Bitter Draught are not matched before Daumier.

Adriaen Brouwer was one of the most original talents in Flemish art. Brouwer’s version of the popular theme, The Card Players, is a genre piece in a small format, with marvelous, velvety colouring.

Adriaen Brouwer represents the link between Dutch and Flemish genre painting. He lived in Antwerp and Amsterdam and seems to have been a pupil of Frans Hals, although Rubens’ influence is also evident in his work. His paintings introduce us to the world of Dutch genre painting, which enjoyed great success in the 17th century.

Brouwer painted almost exclusively subjects of taverns and drinkers, which he used to point out the negative effects of alcohol. His paintings show the squalid side of tavern life, filled with grotesque figures drinking and smoking to excess. It would seem that he himself inhabited this milieu, living a life of indulgence which eventually led him to prison. He died of the plague aged thirty-two.

This is one of the rare landscapes of the artist.

Brouwer painted almost exclusively subjects of taverns and drinkers. This picture portrays an outdoor drinking scene set on the outskirts of a village.