David Teniers the Younger, Peasants playing Bowls outside a Village Inn

Teniers’s imaginary landscape shows peasants at their leisure. The sheep on the far side of the river enjoy the best of the fitful sunshine, but with a few strokes of the brush Teniers created a shower of rain over the substantial village and the church in the distance. The men in the foreground playing bowls are in shadow, though the white shirt of one competitor stands out as he bends to take aim. His target is a stick fixed in the ground rather than a jack and they play on uneven ground rather than grass – far from the smooth lawns used today – but it is essentially the same game.

They play outside an inn. A man runs alongside a ball as if encouraging it along, and others discuss the players’ skills, possibly laying bets on the winner. A girl looks out of the house next door apparently unaware of the man relieving himself against the wall (a comic figure that appears in many of Teniers’s paintings). The inn sign (‘The Crescent Moon’) hangs overhead, looking newly painted, and unlike in many of Teniers’s other pictures of inns, both interior and exterior, this one appears to be solid and well kept. His figures, while a little caricatured, aren’t as grotesque and exaggerated as he often makes them appear (look at An Old Peasant caresses a Kitchen Maid in a Stable, for example).

Images of the activities of peasants appear to have had great appeal to the middle-class people who bought paintings in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, both Holland and Flanders. Teniers made a career of these scenes, and he wasn’t alone: Jan Steen was also a master of the genre, as you can see in his Skittle Players outside an Inn. As the title suggests, Steen’s figures play skittles rather than bowls, and they are better dressed and even less caricatured than those here; he also added more than a hint of flirtation to the scene. Steen’s colours are brighter and more lustrous than Teniers’s – though that may partly be a question of fading and yellowed varnish – but the paintings both show the hard-working peasant at leisure as a means of entertainment and amusement for the bourgeois classes.