Woman with wineglass and two male peasants

Cornelis Bega was the grandson of the acclaimed history painter Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem and a pupil of the genre painter Adriaen van Ostade, who probably studied under Frans Hals. He pursued a successful career both as a printmaker – the Gallery owns the Duc d’Arenberg collection of the etchings of Cornelis Bega, the most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world – and as a painter of scenes of salty, low-life taverns, domestic interiors and villages.

This small-scale work is typical of Bega’s panel paintings from the early 1660s, in that he had reduced the number of figures of his previously well-populated genre paintings to one or several individuals, often engaged in drinking, music-making or some other form of merriment. Here, a young woman contemplates a glass of wine that may have just been presented to her by the lecherous-looking man to her left, who holds a smoking implement. In front of him, barely discernible, another man relieves himself against the rear wall of the shadowy tavern nearby. One can only speculate how this episode will conclude.

Tony Magnusson, Curator of European Art, 2016–18