Nemo Loquebatur' ('No one was speaking')

This artwork is part of a group of five pastels. They form a humorous story that shows a group of distinguished gentlemen having a sociable evening, which starts off respectably and gradually gets completely out of hand through drink. The name of the series, ‘NELRI’, is a composition of the initials of the five Latin titles at the tops of the frames.

Here, Troost did not work in oil but in gouache (opaque watercolour with gum arabic) and pastel (soft chalk). This technique was very popular in the eighteenth century.