Dutch school; 19th century.

Dutch school; 19th century.
"Drinkers".
Oil on canvas glued to board.
Presents restorations.
Measurements: 34.5 x 31 cm; 50 x 46 cm (frame).
The genre painting in Holland, enclosed a moral lesson sometimes hardly hidden. The picturesque scenes and the satirical ones, with rough peasants given to the pleasures, as well as the scenes of citizens conversing or dancing, have been recognized for a long time as negative moral examples that also appear as metaphors in the popular moralizing literature of the time. In the Netherlands people were familiar with the books of moralizing purposes by Roemer Visscher, Jacob Cats and others, as is clear from the artistic motifs derived from them. Thus, genre painting produces a rather conservative impression. The Southern Netherlands did not really cultivate the more restrained and seemingly realistic but in fact emblematic images of contemporary domestic life that we find in Dutch paintings of the second half of the seventeenth century. However, within the Flemish school of the seventeenth century, in the subjects of customs, an important novelty will appear, the so-called tavern painting. This is a genre created by Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638) and David Teniers (1610-1690), characterized by depicting tavern interiors populated by colorful and vulgar characters, often even grotesque in the case of Brouwer, bordering on caricature. This type of scenes, violent in the case of Brouwer and his followers or more cheerful, in the case of the school of Teniers, enjoyed great diffusion, and even spread to Holland, creating a new genre there as well. In this type of painting the characters will be the absolute protagonists, and more especially their faces and expressions. They are also works derived from naturalism, worked in reduced chromatisms, around earthy colors, ochers, carmines, etc.