Adriaen Brouwer

There are still a number of unresolved questions surrounding the early life and career of Adriaen Brouwer. The early Dutch biographer Arnold Houbraken included multiple erroneous statements and fanciful stories about Brouwer in his The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters of 1718–19. The most glaring mistakes of Houbraken were to place Brouwer's place of birth in Haarlem in the Dutch Republic and to identify Frans Hals as his master. , Frankfurt It is now generally accepted that Brouwer was born in Oudenaarde in Flanders in 1605 or 1606. His father who was also called Adriaen worked as a tapestry designer in Oudenaarde, at the time an important centre for tapestry production in Flanders. The father died in poverty when Adriaen the younger was only 15 or 16 years old. Brouwer had by that time already left the paternal home. Brouwer worked in Antwerp in 1622. By March 1625 Adriaen Brouwer was recorded in Amsterdam where he resided in the inn of the painter Barend van Someren, another Flemish artist who had taken up residence in the Dutch Republic. Brouwer is further recorded on 23 July 1626 as a notary's witness when he signed a statement of Barend van Someren and Adriaen van Nieulandt about a sale of pictures in Amsterdam. It is possible that by that time he already lived in Haarlem. The stylistic similarities of van Craesbeeck's early work with that of Brouwer seem to corroborate such pupilage. On 26 April 1634 Adriaen Brouwer took up lodgings in the house of the prominent engraver Paulus Pontius as the two men had become close friends. The same year the pair joined the local chamber of rhetoric Violieren. , Munich Early biographers describe how Adriaen Brouwer and his artist friends spent much of their time in local taverns. Brouwer painted a tavern scene called The Smokers, which included a self-portrait together with portraits of Jan Cossiers, Jan Lievens, Joos van Craesbeeck and Jan Davidsz. de Heem (c. 1636, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The company of friends is shown sitting around a table and smoking. Brouwer is the figure in the middle who is turned around to face the viewer. This type of group portrait doubled as a representation of one of the five senses (in this case the sense of taste). Despite his reported dissolute lifestyle and his preference for low-life subjects, Brouwer was highly respected by his colleagues as evidenced by the fact that Rubens owned 17 works by Brouwer at the time of his death, of which at least one had been acquired before Rubens got to know Brouwer personally. Rembrandt and Titus van Rijn also had paintings by Brouwer in his collection. In 1635 Brouwer took on Jan-Baptist Dandoy (active 1631–1638) as his only officially registered pupil. In January 1638 Adriaen Brouwer died in Antwerp. Some early biographers associated his early death with his party lifestyle and abuse of alcohol. Houbraken, however, attributes his death to the plague. Evidence for the latter is that originally his remains were buried in a common grave. A month after his death on 1 February 1638, his body was re-interred in the Carmelite Church of Antwerp after a solemn ceremony and at the initiative and expense and in the presence of his artist friends. ==Work==

General Brouwer left a small body of work amounting to about 60 works. Just a few of his works are signed, while none is dated. The principal subject matter of Brouwer are genre scenes with peasants, soldiers and other "lower class" individuals engaging in drinking, smoking, card or dice playing, fights etc. often set in taverns or rural settings. Despite the modern title, the scene is a group portrait of fellow artists of Adriaen Brouwer who resided in Antwerp. Not all of them have been identified with certainty. Brouwer is the second figure on the left who is turned towards the viewer. He has his eyes wide open, holds a beer jug in his right hand and puffs out smoke from his pipe. The figure on the far right has been identified as Jan Davidsz. de Heem. The other artists have not been identified with certainty but it has been suggested that Jan Lievens is the person on the far left, Joos van Craesbeeck the person in the middle and Jan Cossiers the second person on the right. This group portrait is regarded as belonging to the type of the "friendship portrait". Similar friendship portraits that include a self-portrait had been created before by Rubens in his Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends from Mantua and by Simon de Vos in the group portrait of himself with Johan Geerlof and Jan Cossiers referred to as Gathering of Smokers and Drinkers. While the latter two friendship portraits were fairly conventional, Brouwer innovated the type in The Smokers. He achieved this by expanding the portraits to full-length portraits, setting the scene in a tavern, the expressiveness of the faces and the nonchalant demeanour and clothing of the sitters. The dynamism of the composition brings the group portrait closer to Brouwer's tavern scenes than to contemporary portrait paintings. Genre painters often returned to the old theme of the allegory of the five senses and created series of tronies depicting the five senses or the seven deadly sins. ==Influence==

Brouwer influenced a large number of Flemish and Dutch painters including Adriaen van Ostade and his brother Isak, Cornelis Saftleven, David Teniers the Younger, Joos van Craesbeeck, David Ryckaert, Gillis van Tilborch, Mattheus van Helmont, Hendrik Martenszoon Sorgh, Horatius Bollongier, Giacomo Francesco Cipper, Daniël Boone and Joseph Danhauser. ==In literature==

In ''Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1837'', Letitia Elizabeth Landon published a poem entitled "A Dutch Interior" based on Brouwer's painting Peasants playing cards in an Inn. ==References==