Smoker at the Window

This etching shows the use of one of the New World’s most far-reaching commodities. Tobacco, which was introduced into the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century, was by the early seventeenth century being imported and processed in large quantities in Middelburg, Amsterdam, and, later, Rotterdam; this importation of tobacco from the Chesapeake Bay area continued long after the Dutch colonial presence in North America was gone.

Van Ostade’s townsman, clay pipe in hand, is just one of a great many genre depictions of smoking in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. By the time this image was made, smoking would have been seen as much more socially acceptable; still in genre scenes depicting peasants, the practice has a negative connotation, which is reinforced by this man’s somewhat glazed expression and the tankard in his other hand which is about to tip.

(Andrew C. Weislogel, “The New and Unknown World: Art, Exploration, and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age,” catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and presented at the Johnson Museum August 13 –October 2, 2011)