^ Born on 10 December 1610: Adriaen van Ostade, Dutch painter and engraver who died in 1685.
— Van Ostade may have studied with the Dutch artist Frans Hals and later came under the influence of the great master Rembrandt; Ostade was probably the teacher of the genre painter Jan Steen. Ostade painted many small genre pictures, lively and vigorous and full of subtle effects of light and shade. His subject matter included tavern scenes, peasants drinking and smoking, itinerant musicians, village festivities, and quaint village characters. He also executed 50 etchings depicting peasant life. While his early works are generally filled with rowdy, bawdy characters, his works after around 1650 show more refined and respectable scenes. — Adriaen van Ostade (Adriaen Hendricx) was born in Haarlem. His father, Jan Hendricx, came from Ostade near Eindhoven, and his sons, Adriaen and Isaac, adopted this name as painters. In 1627, Adriaen was a pupil of Frans Hals, and, in 1634 joined the Lukas Guild in Haarlem of which he was later the head, in 1647, 1661 and 1662.
     He was one of the most popular Dutch painters, specializing from the start in genre painting of peasant life. In his early period, A. van Ostade was under the influence of A. Brouwer, in the 1640s of Rembrandt. From about 1650 his paintings turned more and more towards Delft genre painting, the interiors became more pleasant, and open-air scenes were added.
     A. van Ostade had many pupils and followers, the most important among them were his younger brother, Isack,  Jan Steen, Cornelis Dusart, and Cornelis Pietersz Bega. The artist died in Haarlem.
— LINKS
— Dancing Couple — Landscape with an Old Oak (1640) — Peasants in an Interior (The Skaters) (1650) — Peasants in an Interior (1661) — The Fishwife (1673) — The Merry Peasant (1640) — The Painter's Studio (1640) — The Pall-Mall Court (1677) — 59 Engravings at FAMSF
— Drunkards in a Tavern (42x57cm) _ detail _ enlarged detail
— De Drinker: Three boors drinking and smoking in a spirit house (29x23cm) _ This painting and its former pendant, A man and a woman drinking at a table, were for long regarded as two of the finest of Adriaen van Ostade. The pendant is dated 1661, placing the pair during the zenith of Ostade's career, at a time when his work combines the mature development of style and subject matter with the vivacity and charm of which he was at his best possessed. In the present painting this is reflected in the sympathy of interpretation, subtlety of palette and fineness of detail for which Ostade is so admired.
      Ostade was one of the foremost genre painters of seventeenth-century Holland, 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 parties of smoking, drinking and dancing peasants in their village surroundings. He initially adopted a satirical, almost caricatured, manner, but from the 1640s onwards began to endow his low-life protagonists with increasing degrees of restraint and dignity, his palette becoming richer and his chiaroscuro stronger.
      Although such works are more prevalent from the 1640s, from relatively early in his career Van Ostade had painted scenes of tranquil domestic comfort (for example the Village Alehouse with Four Figures of 1635). In them, the action is less important than the depiction of a psychological state, and the setting gains in significance. In the course of the 1640s, however, Ostade increasingly began to explore that approach to the theme, thereby moving further away from Brouwer's influence towards a fully mature, personal style. His interiors became more spacious, flat-ceilinged and better furnished, whilst the figures and their costumes, as well as the furnishings and utensils attendant on peasant life, are shown in more detail, for example the Three Peasants at an Inn of 1647.
      Through the 1650s and by the date of the present work, scenes of excessive drinking and gambling became the exception rather than the rule. Ostade's peasants are mostly shown relishing the small pleasures permitted by their modest existence. This shift is accompanied by a change in the implicit meaning of the pictures: thus in place of, or alongside, the traditional satire on human frailty, the simplicity of peasant life is held up as a model or even idealized. In addition, his interiors continue to show an increasing emphasis on detail, whilst, as in the present work, the strong local colouring of the figures stands out powerfully from the tonal twilight of the interior setting.