Fourteen men gather around two tables in a dim tavern in this vertical painting. More men sit around a high, broad chimney, and another person, perhaps a boy, moves a basket the size of a laundry hamper in the lower right corner of the painting. The people all have pale, peachy skin, and they all wear hats. Their hats, jackets, and trousers are painted in shades of brick red, muted blue, gray, or brown with a few touches of brighter white at some of their collars. Several hold or smoke long-stemmed white pipes. The table closer to us is in the center of the composition, with one narrow end…
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Tavern Scene

Adriaen van Ostade (Dutch, 1610 - 1685)

early 1660s

Medium
oil on panel
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
overall: 23.8 x 20.4 cm (9 3/8 x 8 1/16 in.) ; framed: 30.1 x 26.3 x 4.7 cm (11 7/8 x 10 3/8 x 1 7/8 in.)
Culture
Dutch
Museum
National Gallery of Art, CNE-B
Credit line
Gift of John Russell Mason
Rights
Public domain (NGA Open Access, CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed

View at the National Gallery of Art