The Halt at the Inn

The vivid sense of daily life that seventeenth-century Dutch artists conveyed in their work is one of that period’s most delightful aspects, and Isack van Ostade was the most important of a number of Haarlem artists who painted rural life at that time. The social area outside a tavern became one of his favorite subjects, providing him the opportunity to combine his skills both as a landscapist and as a genre painter.

In this painting, we witness the bustle of activity outside a village inn as two well-dressed travelers arrive and dismount from their horses. A woman with a child strapped to her back has stopped to watch, and others converse with the travelers. The street is filled with people, and the informality of all these human interactions creates a sense of conviviality. Van Ostade carefully depicts the timeworn brick-and-mortar construction of the inn and accentuates the charming character of the scene with details such as the vines clinging to the buildings. He exaggerated the level of disrepair to make the structures more picturesque. Such liberties in his painted works are revealed by the drawings he made from life on his treks in the countryside around Haarlem, which clearly show the various inns to be in good repair.

A student of his more famous older brother Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), Isack died at the young age of twenty-eight. Despite his short artistic career, he had a significant influence on his contemporaries, including Jan Steen (1625/1626–1679), with whom he occasionally collaborated.