Two Roman gamblers quarrel over a throw of the dice while their words, in faulty Latin, float above their heads. In a London print, a clock reads four in the morning over men still drinking. In New York, a saloon gets around a ban on boxing by selling memberships good for one night. For nearly two thousand years, painters have kept pulling up a chair at the tavern table.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
In painting, a tavern means any public room where people pay to drink and then linger: the Roman caupona, the Dutch inn, the London coffeehouse, the Paris café, the American saloon. What keeps drawing artists back is the mix. Under one roof sit people who would rarely share a table anywhere else, and they behave there as they might not at home.
That freedom mattered, because most commissions left no room for it. An altarpiece or an official portrait rarely left room for laughter, quarrels, flirting or drunkenness, and the tavern offered all four. It also handed the painter a ready group: drink loosens faces and gestures, games give hands something to do, and a crowded table turns figures toward one another, or pointedly away. When a moral lesson came, it usually arrived wrapped in a joke.
Choosing the twelve pictures required a rule. A work qualified if the museum that holds it places the scene in an inn, tavern, café, bar or cabaret, or if the picture is built around what happens at those tables, with dice, cards, pipes, a tankard or a glass.
Most of the twelve also share one habit. The painter brings real people into the room, himself, his friends or a known regular, so the scene reads less as an invented crowd than as a record of people who actually drank there.
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 available
Where to see it: National Archaeological Museum, Naples (inventory 111482)
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. Around it, four more men crowd a small room, cheeks puffed around their pipes, eyes squinting, under a haze of smoke.