Peasants Smoking in an Inn (c. 1640): Art, History and Details

Peasants Smoking in an Inn (c. 1640) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is David Teniers (Flemish, 1610–1690).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

David Teniers the Younger was a popular artist who specialized in small paintings of rustic Flemish life in the 1600s. In works such as Peasants Smoking in an Inn, an older man and a younger man in the foreground smoke tobacco. The younger man rests limply against the wall and his head lolls back, a gesture that symbolized that he had overindulged in smoke. Another standing man prepares his pipe and watches the younger man with amusement. Tobacco was a novelty in the 1600s, introduced from the Americas and East Indies with other new imports such as sugar cane and rice, and was believed to be a medicinal product. It was particularly recommended for people who lived in "waterish places" such as Antwerp, the capital of Flanders, where Teniers painted this scene. Although many medical practitioners believed tobacco to be a cure for numerous ailments, moral opponents to smoking criticized it as a danger to health and morals. The mixed reputation and widespread popularity of tobacco smoking thus made it a marketable and amusing subject for Flemish artists such as Teniers.

Object facts

• Title: Peasants Smoking in an Inn
• Date: c. 1640
• Creator attribution: David Teniers (Flemish, 1610–1690)
• Culture: Flanders
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 46.5 x 37 x 4 cm (18 5/16 x 14 9/16 x 1 9/16 in.); Unframed: 37.2 x 26.3 cm (14 5/8 x 10 3/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Netherlandish-Flemish
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.1046

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• "The Wade Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 1 (1917): 3-12.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Great Lakes Exposition Cleveland, Ohio) (1936-1937 : Catalogue of the Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Cleveland Museum of Art: The Official Art Exhibit of the Great Lakes Exposition: June Twenty-Sixth to October Fourth 1936. 1st ed. [Cleveland, Ohio]: [Cleveland Museum of Art], 1936.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.