A tavern is one of the few rooms where nobody poses. Strangers share a table, drink loosens faces, and an argument can start over nothing. For nearly two thousand years painters have sat down there to watch, sometimes slipping themselves into the crowd, sometimes casting their friends as drunks, and at least once costing their models their good name.
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How These Were Chosen
In painting, a tavern is any public room where people pay to eat or drink and then stay: an inn, a coffeehouse, a café, a saloon, a cabaret. Under one roof sit people who rarely share a table elsewhere, and they behave as they would not at home.
Most commissions, an altarpiece or an official portrait, left no room for laughter, quarrels or drunkenness. The tavern offered all three, and a ready group: drink loosens gestures, games keep hands busy, a crowded table turns figures toward one another.
The rule of choice follows. Each scene takes place in such a room or is built around what happens at its tables, and the twelve run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Unknown Roman painter, The Dice Players, Caupona of Salvius (before 79 CE)
Above the heads of two men at a tavern table, a few words are painted straight onto the wall. They are the players' own lines, in the Pompeii fresco known as The Dice Players.
The scene decorated a caupona, a Roman tavern, on a street corner in Pompeii. An unknown painter made it some time before Vesuvius buried the city in 79 CE. The place is known as the caupona of Salvius, after an election notice on its wall, and the dice game is one of four scenes of tavern life painted there side by side.
In this one, a dice cup sits between the two men, and the game has already gone sour. The first player shouts Exsi, literally "I'm out," which here means "I've won." His opponent shoots back Non tria duas est, "It's not three, it's two."
That reply is bad Latin. Tria duas breaks the grammar, and the spelling follows the way people spoke in the street rather than the way they were taught to write.
Those mistakes are what convince me. Left uncorrected, the two lines sound overheard at the next table rather than composed for a wall.
At a Glance
Artist: Unknown Roman painter
Painted: Before 79 CE
Medium: Fresco (painted wall plaster)
Size: not published
Where to see it: National Archaeological Museum, Naples
11. Adriaen Brouwer, The Smokers (about 1636)
One face in the middle of The Smokers by Adriaen Brouwer turns toward the viewer, eyes wide, as if someone had just walked in. Four more men crowd the small room around him, cheeks puffed around their pipes, under a haze of smoke. The startled man is no ordinary drinker, and his companions may not be either.