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The Card Players: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), c. 1630s, oil on panel, 25 x 39 cm (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp)
Jan van Hogspuew staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.
Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.
Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!
Philip Larkin: The Card-Players, 6 May 1970, from High Windows (1974)
Card Playing Peasants in the Tavern: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), c. 1630s, oil on panel, 33 x 43 cm (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
Brawling Peasants in the Tavern: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), c. 1630s, oak, 26.5 x 32.5 cm (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden)
Peasants Smoking and Drinking: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), c. 1635, oil on panel, 35 x 26 cm (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
The Bitter Draught: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), c. 1635, oil on oak, 26.5 x 32.5 cm (Städelsche Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)
Drunken Peasant in a Tavern: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638),c. 1624, oil on panel, 35 x 26 cm (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam)
Peasants of Moerdyck: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), 1628-1630, oil on panel, 31 x 20 cm (Private collection)
Interior of a Smoking Room: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), 1630-1632, oil on wood, 22 x 29 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Smoking Men: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), c. 1636, oil on wood, 46 x 36,5 cm (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Seated Drinkers: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), c. 1630s, oil on oak, 25.5 x 21 cm (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels)
Village Scene with Men Drinking: Adriaen Brouwer (1606?-1638), 1631-1635, oil on panel, 63 x 96 cm (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)
The short-lived Flemish genre painter Adriaen Brouwer was probably born under the name Adriaen de Brauwer in Oudenaarde. He seems to have moved about 1621 via Antwerp to Haarlem, where he studied under Frans Hals while also trying his luck at stage-acting and poetry. He worked for the next ten years in Haarlem and Amsterdam. Returning to Antwerp in the Spanish-ruled south Netherlands in 1931, he was arrested as a spy by the Spanish and imprisoned until 1633. He then spent the last years of his life in Antwerp. His specialty, for which in his day he was much imitated (and copied by forgers) in Flanders and Holland, was low-life tavern scenes -- plainly observed from life and probably not from such a great distance at that. (The central foreground figure blowing smoke rings in Smoking Men, fourth painting from the bottom here, is thought to be the painter himself, and several of the surrounding figures in the composition have been taken to represent his fellow artists of Antwerp.) Not entirely unlike the figures in his tavern scenes, Brouwer would seem to have enjoyed living to the full limits of his means; he left behind him a trail of debt and financial trouble.
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