Workmen before an Inn

In Dutch society, inns were not only the hubs of social life and the temporary home of travelers, but they also served as meeting halls for merchants, notaries, and artisan guilds. Tavern drinkers and idlers frequently appear in Dutch genre scenes, but Isack van Ostade’s depiction of workers restocking an inn is very unusual. Under the watchful eye of the innkeeper, two laborers use a yoke to haul barrels of beer or wine off a sledge; their overworked, scrawny horse bears the scars of a hard existence. A small boy brings a jug of ale up from the cellar, a woman sells her wares under a canopy, and a lame man hobbles toward the taproom. Above the doorway, the two barrel staves with the grapevine and the pitcher signal to all travelers that they are approaching an inn. On the chimney, two storks—traditional emblems of voyagers—rest in their nest.

Isack van Ostade was the most important of a number of Haarlem artists who painted rural life in the early seventeenth century, and the area outside a tavern became one of his favorite subjects, as it gave him the chance to combine his skills as a landscapist and a genre painter. 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.