European school following 17th century Dutch models. "Pipe smoker". Oil on copper. It presents slight jumps in the painting. Dutch frame. With old auction label on the back. Measurements: 21,5 x 19 cm; 36,5 x 32,5 cm (frame). The present work is based on 17th century Dutch models. It depicts a man in a crowded interior, standing next to a table littered with gadgets, holding a pipe in his right hand and smoking it leisurely. Genre painting in Flanders, as in Holland, contained a sometimes barely concealed moral lesson. Picturesque and satirical scenes, with rough peasants indulging in pleasures, as well as scenes of citizens conversing or dancing, have long been recognised as negative moral examples that also appear as metaphors in the popular moralising literature of the time. In the Netherlands people were familiar with the moralising books by Roemer Visscher, Jacob Cats and others, as is evident from the artistic motifs derived from them. Thus, genre painting in 17th century Flanders produces a rather conservative impression. The South Netherlands did not really cultivate the more restrained and seemingly realistic but in fact emblematic images of contemporary domestic life that we find in Dutch paintings of the second half of the 17th century. However, within the Flemish school of 17th-century Flemish genre, an important novelty was the so-called tavern painting. This was a genre created by Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638) and David Teniers (1610-1690), characterised by depictions of tavern interiors populated by colourful and vulgar characters, often even grotesque in Brouwer's case, bordering on caricature. This type of scene, violent in the case of Brouwer and his followers or more cheerful in the case of Teniers' school, was widely disseminated and spread to Holland, where it also created a new genre. In this type of painting the figures are the absolute protagonists, particularly their faces and expressions. They are also works derived from naturalism, worked in reduced chromatisms, with earthy, ochre, carmine, etc. colours. In this work we see a portrait executed according to Flemish models. Dimensions 21,5 x 19 cm; 36,5 x 32,5 cm (frame).