Hendrick Pot, 'A Merry Company at Table', 1630

Scenes set in brothels (called bordeeltjes in Dutch) were a popular genre in seventeenth-century painting; in English, they have come to be known, rather euphemistically, as ‘Merry Companies’. But euphemisms can’t disguise the sort of merrymaking we are seeing here. If the two young women seated on the laps of their clients don’t make things clear enough, Hendrick Pot has included a much older woman right in the centre of the picture: she is the one who runs the brothel.

He has laid plenty of other clues. Clearly there’s a lot of drinking going on: as well as the wine glasses around the table, we can’t miss the wine flagon and cooler left on the floor to the left. The group has been tucking into oysters too, as we can see from the empty shells scattered on the plates and one which has dropped on the floor. Both oysters and alcohol were believed to have aphrodisiac qualities, as was tobacco – a point underlined here by the way the old woman is using her forefinger to push it into in the bowl of her pipe. This would have been interpreted as an obscene gesture. The dog licking the man’s fingers in the bottom right corner is also probably suggestive of licentiousness.

Although the men are the paying customers, it is the women who are clearly in charge in this picture. The two younger ones both look directly at us with a knowing glance, and the brothel-keeper watches on wryly. The men are either too inebriated or too distracted to notice who is running the show, or that we are watching them. The two on the right appear to be extremely drunk. One has knocked over a glass on the table in front of him and his eyes seem to be rolling as he tries to tempt the woman to take some wine. The other, in the foreground, is so far gone that he is holding his glass in a precarious position against his chest. The third man, meanwhile, is getting excited to the point where the woman on his lap is having to hold his hand back. He has already half removed his jacket.

We are clearly intended to be amused by what is going on, but that doesn’t mean that Hendrick Pot expected his customers to approve of such behaviour. As well as entertainments, pictures of this sort were understood to be cautioning against high living, manipulative women – as Pot would have seen it – and the consequences of immorality. In this painting, he also seems to be reminding the viewer of the transience of youth and beauty. The brothel-keeper’s sunken cheeks and wrinkled face are in clear contrast to the fresh complexions of the young women. The subtext is that it’s all very well having fun when you are young, but eventually you will have to face up to old age and death. And, according to the beliefs of what was a highly religious society, death was inevitably followed by judgement at the gates of heaven.