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The Drunken Couple
Also titled Het dronken paar
Jan Havicksz. Steen (Leiden, ca. –1679)
c. 1655 - c. 1665
- Medium
- oil paint (paint), oak (wood)
- Classification
- painting
- Dimensions
- height 52.5 cm x width 64 cm
- Museum
- Rijksmuseum
- Credit line
- On loan from the City of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop Bequest)
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark, 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
About this work
A man and woman are so drunk that they are unaware they are being robbed. Their foolishness is underscored by the print on the partition. It depicts an owl, considered a stupid creature in the 17th century. After all, it could not see by day, not even with a candle or eyeglasses. The drunken couple is thus just as blind as the owl, a message that survives in the English idiom ‘blind as a bat’.
