Dancing Couple

A couple dances in the middle of a humble farm interior while onlookers gather round, a fiddler and a piper providing the music and a woman clapping time in the doorway. Painted around 1635, this is an early work of Adriaen van Ostade, the great chronicler of Dutch peasant life, executed in the lively, broadly painted manner he developed under the influence of Frans Hals. The animated poses, the warm brown tonality and the shrewd observation of country folk made such scenes his speciality, and his farmyard dances and interiors became among the most imitated genre pictures of the age.