David Teniers the Younger, 'Two Men playing Cards in the Kitchen of an Inn', probably 1635-40

Two bearded old men sit at a small table playing cards. What little light there is focuses on the white cap of one and the grey hair of the other, as well as their white collars, and reveals them to be better dressed than some other patrons of the inn. The inn itself is drab and sparsely furnished. A man relieves himself in the shadows on the left, but the two old men, undisturbed, concentrate on their game. One deals, the other fans out his hand of well worn cards, heads together with a smiling companion who clutches the handle of the tall stone tankard on the table.

Behind the card players, a smoker looks on. Next to him, a young man with long hair and a clean white collar and cuffs stuffs tobacco into a pipe with great care. A woman wearing the white coif and black cap of a widow leans through an interior window overhead to follow the state of play. Light through an exterior window does little to illuminate the dingy back room, where a young woman sits by an open fire making pancakes for a group of jostling peasants. She looks back at a man in the group behind her and the expression on her face suggests a certain tension in the air. Perhaps it has something to do with the man waving a pancake over her head, who glances in the same direction.

Teniers has paid great attention to the objects in the foreground, and it’s possible he has placed them prominently because each one was often used as a symbol of bad behaviour. The glinting jug and the beer barrel suggest drunkenness. The dropped clogs, the open mussel shells and the white cloth abandoned on the barrel were seen as signs of the loss of a woman’s virginity – in this case, the pancake maker’s. She’s surrounded by men in various stages of drunkenness; perhaps she has little chance of retaining her virtue.

The rowdy backroom is contrasted with the sedate middle-class pair playing cards, though the card game and the young man smoking might be seen as the first steps on a downward path. Teniers has painted their faces in a far less cartoon-like manner than is usual for him. The texture of their skin and their facial expressions are far more realistic than those of the group round the pancake maker, where Teniers has used his customary grotesque and exaggerated style. Pictures of ‘merry-making peasants’ – as they were known in Teniers’s time – were popular with well-to-do buyers, who would find them amusing but also use them as a moral lesson.