Peasants by an Inn (oil on canvas)

This lively and humorous scene depicts peasants enjoying their leisure in the beer-making city of Haarlem. A couple dance to the music of a hurdy-gurdy player. Many paintings of the golden age of painting in Holland have a moralising tone which is only subtly referred to here by the church in the distance. Ostade’s depiction of the group is affectionate and perhaps complicit rather than judgmental. Baron Lionel de Rothschild (1808-1879), a member the international banking dynasty collected fine works of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, many from the well-known collection of Willem van Loon (1794-1847).