The Dutch Masters Make Merry Company
It’s late August. Summer is fading, the long lazy days are getting shorter, the lax attitude cramping under the return of rules. The heat lingers, yet the shorts and the Magnum PI Hawaiians go into the back of the closet. The return to pants is imminent. You are sad. You need a drink. We all do.
Sure, you can sit at your kitchen table with a bottle of Makers Mark. You can scroll through your happy summer pictures on Insta and Facebook: beers at the Fourth of July barbecue; margaritas at the pool bar on your Mexican vacation; drinking with buddies at the Phillies game. You can make the inevitable late-night switch to YouTube. But this will surely have you understanding and cry-singing Morrissey lyrics at 3 am. No. you want to drink with purpose. You can drink to the good times you’ve had this summer. And that is why we are celebrating a group of 17th century Dutch master painters.
Stick with me.
The painters of the 17th century Dutch Golden Age invented a genre of painting called Merry Company. This movement was the first to depict common people enjoying themselves in social situations and settings. By ‘social settings’ we mean taverns, inns, and brothels, and by ‘enjoying themselves’ we mean drinking, gambling, and cavorting with prostitutes. Say what you want about the Dutch, but they have long understood the importance of prostitutes in the general merriment of society.
This (somewhat) debaucherous genre could have only happened in the Dutch Republic, as the 17th century Dutch were even then known for their liberal stance on humanity, religion, and individual rights. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had left them free of the religious oppression of Spain. After which they basically stripped off their clothes and leaned hard into developing distilled spirits and touching boobs. They were a safe haven for Europe’s political dissidents and religious outcasts. A haven used by the passengers of a little ship called the Mayflower before they eventually deemed the Dutch too liberal for their work, pray, die-in-agony religion and so off they went to the stark shores of North America and the tragedy of turnip beer. The Dutch made no apologies. They prospered in business, education, arts, and culture. And with those things in order, it was Molenaar Time. They placed a great deal of emphasis on abundance, food, drink, and social interaction. And this joie de vivre oozed out of their very realistic depictions of inns, brothels, taverns, and the delights of those places both epicurean and prostitute-based.
One thing the Merry Company painters such as Jan Steen, Adriaen Brouwer, and Frans Hals did was move art away from its weird medieval themes. The painters of the medieval era drew giant rabbits killing people, knights bravely fighting gargantuan snails, demons with faces on their genitals, and Mary Magdalene’s affair with Bigfoot. On a purely unrelated note, the possibility that medieval monks accidentally created LSD is worth looking into. Further, they abandoned religious, mythological, and royal subjects and focused on very realistic depictions of common people. No longer did we have Bacchus and his drunken buddy Silenus being carried around by satyrs, instead we had soldiers, prostitutes, and peasants with titles such as ‘Tavern Scene’, ‘Peasants Brawling over Cards’, ‘The Drunken Couple’, ‘Merrymaking in a Tavern’, ‘The Affections of Whores’ and ‘The Nuzzle of Dogs’. This follows the ancient rule that after you gain the affection of a whore, you need to nuzzle a dog. There are depictions of everyday activities and games like ‘Lady, Come into the Garden’, whose rules remain a mystery, but whose goal was the removal of clothes. Or ‘The Hot Hand’ during which men just got smacked and which had been created either by a drunk man or an ingenious woman.
Why do we drink to the Merry Company today? Because they gave the world its first pub pictures. Sure, alcohol had been depicted before the 17th century Dutch masters picked up their brushes and encouraged peasants to drink with both hands. But this was mostly in mythological or classical settings. A still life of a wine glass surrounded by fruit in a sunbeam. We may one day stumble across a cave painting wherein Boog depicts Moog getting too tipsy on fermented einkorn wheat and hitting on Gloria. But until then, we celebrate the Dutch painters, who captured the happy bits of taverns – the drinking and the prostitutes, and their inevitable downside – the brawls and the syphilis. And so do we (well, metaphorically). Every time you smile for a camera in a bar, you pay homage to these masters of realism and the joys of the common people. Each time you are horrified by a candid shot of your red-faced maw ordering an ill-advised Jagerbomb or trying to chat up a corner fern, you carry on this tradition of people being merry in company.
And so what shall we drink to celebrate?
Gin.
The Dutch influence that spread through Europe is undeniable. The Dutch were among the first to experiment with distilled liquors outside of medicinal needs. So they had a variety of options to Hun keel smeren (wet their whistle) when they arrived at the tavern. One of the most popular was jenever, the grandpappy of gin. English soldiers who came back from the Eighty Years’ War brought back a taste for jenever and almost certainly the potpourri of venereal diseases that made this gin-ancestor a daily comfort.
Today we drink Kuyper’s Cocktail, a drink made with only ingredients that would have been available to the 17th century Dutch. We assume you don’t have access to jenever, but you do have access to gin. If that assumption is incorrect, then forgive me and replace gin with jenever and get off your high horse.
Kuyper’s Cocktail
Ingredients
- 2 oz Gin (preferably one with a strong juniper flavor like London Dry)
- ½ oz Whiskey (malty-forward whiskey like a single malt Scotch or Irish whiskey, this will help add the maltiness you are missing with no jenever. If you have jenever, then skip the whiskey and get off your high horse.)
- Dash of Angostura Bitters
- Dash of honey
- Lemon slice for garnish
Instructions
In a mixing glass or anything that reliably holds liquids, combine the gin, whiskey, and bitters. Add a dash of honey and stir well. Pour the mixture into a small glass with or without ice. It’s up to you, we won’t judge (to your face). Garnish with lemon slice. If you aren’t feeling so motivated, you can have a Gin Kopstootje (a little gin headbutt), which entails pouring a beer and a shot of gin and alternating between the two. If you do this, go with God. But give him your car keys first.
No matter how you do it, drink to the masters, to the addition of common people to visual art, to the Dutch legacy of enjoying life and all its delights, to the birth of drinking games, to immortalized peasants, to the fact that we are immortalized in Merry Company pictures and therefore we are in great works of art. Scroll through your summer pictures of tipsy joy, sing your Morrissey, drink your drink, and revel in your revelry.
Steen, Jan; Merrymaking in a Tavern; The Wallace Collection; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/merrymaking-in-a-tavern-209153
Great piece. Tried jenever at an old bar in Antwerp many years ago, nice stuff.