page_title: Adriaen Brouwer
section_title: Portraits and tronies
hierarchical_section_title: Adriaen Brouwer / Work / Portraits and tronies
caption_attribution_description: The Back Operationlabel QS:Lde,"Die Operation am Rücken"label QS:Len,"The Back Operation"
context_page_description: Adriaen Brouwer was a Flemish painter active in Flanders and the Dutch Republic in the first half of the 17th century. Brouwer was an important innovator of genre painting through his vivid depictions of peasants, soldiers and other 'lower class' individuals engaged in drinking, smoking, card or dice playing, fighting, music making etc. in taverns or rural settings. Brouwer contributed to the development of the genre of tronies, i.e. head or facial studies, which investigate varieties of expression. In his final year he produced a few landscapes of a tragic intensity. Brouwer's work had an important influence on the next generation of Flemish and Dutch genre painters.
context_section_description: Adriaen Brouwer is regarded as an important innovator of portrait painting, a prominent genre in Netherlandish art.
  His most famous group portrait is set in a tavern and is referred to as The smokers (ca. 1636, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City). Despite the modern title, the scene is a group portrait of fellow artists of Adriaen Brouwer who resided in Antwerp.   Not all of them have been identified with certainty.  Brouwer is the second figure on the left who is turned towards the viewer. He has his eyes wide open, holds a beer jug in his right hand and puffs out smoke from his pipe. The figure on the far right has been identified as Jan Davidsz. de Heem.  The other artists have not been identified with certainty but it has been suggested that Jan Lievens is the person on the far left, Joos van Craesbeeck the person in the middle and Jan Cossiers the second person on the right.  This group portrait is regarded as belonging to the type of the 'friendship portrait'.  Similar friendship portraits that include a self-portrait had been created before by Rubens in his Self-portrait in a circle of friends from Mantua and by Simon de Vos in the group portrait of himself with Johan Geerlof and Jan Cossiers referred to as Gathering of Smokers and Drinkers.  While the latter two friendship portraits were fairly conventional, Brouwer innovated the type in The smokers.  He achieved this by expanding the portraits to full-length portraits, setting the scene in a tavern, the expressiveness of the faces and the nonchalant demeanor and clothing of the sitters.  The dynamism of the composition brings the group portrait closer to Brouwer's tavern scenes than to contemporary portrait paintings. The portrait The smokers falls also into the genre of the 'dissolute' artist portraits that took root in Dutch and Flemish genre painting in the 17th century.  The genre was an inversion of the Renaissance ideal of the 'pictor doctus': the artist as an intellectual and gentleman. This ideal was replaced by the new model of the prodigal artist who is characterized by his creative inspiration and talents.  These (self-)portraits emphasized the artists' dissolute nature by creating associations with traditional moral themes such as the Five senses, the Seven deadly sins and the Prodigal Son in the tavern. In The smokers Bouwers depicted the sense of taste.  
  Brouwer played an important role in the development of the genre of the 'tronie'.  The term tronie typically refers to figure studies not intended to depict an identifiable person, but rather to investigate varieties of expression.  As such tronies are a form of genre painting in a portrait format.  Adriaen Brouwer contributed to the genre as he had a talent for expressiveness. His work gave a face to lower-class figures by infusing their images with recognizable and vividly expressed human emotions—anger, joy, pain, and pleasure.  His Youth Making a Face (c. 1632/1635, National Gallery of Art) shows a young man with a satirical and mocking gesture which humanises him, however uninviting he may appear. Brouwer's vigorous application of paint in this composition, with his characteristically short, unmodulated brushstrokes, increases the dramatic effect.
  Genre painters often returned to the old theme of the allegory of the five senses and created series of tronies depicting the five senses or the seven deadly sins. Brouwer also painted a number of genre portraits that represent the five senses or the seven deadly sins. An example is the painting called Fat man or Luxuria (Mauritshuis), which is believed to be a portrait of Paulus Pontius as well as a representation of the deadly sin of lust ('luxuria' in Latin).
caption: The back operation
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