The History of Painting Drunk People
Note: This research was originally presented as a talk at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015 as part of their Art History Happy Hour Series, co-created with The Advancement of Social Studies. When we were creating our programming, I wanted to explore a topic that was both unique and rarely studied. So, as a co-founder of the Society for the Advancement of Social Studies, where our motto is “All the history you knew but forgot, and all the booze you need to forget it again,” it felt fitting to delve into a subject at the intersection of art and alcohol.
If creating a work of art demands such time and dedication, why would anyone want to create one featuring a drunk person?
As you may know, alcoholic drinks have been around since prehistoric times. And ever since humans began to make and consume it, they’ve had a complicated relationship with it. To magnify that complexity, I’ve chosen to focus specifically on works that don’t just feature someone drinking, they focus on someone who has clearly overindulged in the substance.
I set out to find an answer, and you’re now going to see the results in what I’d like to call:
- Illustrations of the Inebriated
- Paintings of the Plastered
- Likenesses of the Lushes
- Snapshots of the Stewed
- Portraits of the Polluted
and
- Depictions of the Drunk
Now, to caveat this highly noble academic pursuit, I’ll note that my research was limited by 5 things.
First, I’ve focused on portraiture up until the 19th century, which is a style that has come in and out of style and acceptance over all of art history.
Secondly, my research was limited by preservation: art and science didn’t converge around conservation until the 19th century, and even then, the art that has been chosen to be conserved typically is reflective of what the conserver finds worth conserving. More often than not, a person would want to preserve a beautiful picture of a religious icon rather than a man in a corner vomiting. To each their own.
Thirdly, my research was limited by the lack of existing studies on this topic. The findings presented here are based on what I was able to discover using various museum websites and educational sources, and I’m excited for others (especially those who speak other languages!) to build upon this work as the subject is explored further.
Fourthly, provenance: It can be argued (and has been argued) that even though alcoholic beverages were consumed throughout most of the world, Europeans integrated alcohol more extensively, and in greater volumes, into their cultures than people of any other region, leading to more indulgence.
Finally, museums don’t typically catalog their art as “drunk” or “wasted.” So, most of my findings come from English-speaking museums that have digitized their collections, allowing for the searching of drinking vessels and their human companions.
So, while, for example, these luncheon lads are clearly lushes, the MFA description mentions everything BUT the subject matter. On the museum website, you can see the inspiration, the dedication, the buyer, and the historical aftermath… but not what the people were doing in the painting.
However, thanks to hours of research, the specimens of snookered people in art that I have found tell a compelling story about not only art history but the world around the sloshed subject.
The answer to my initial question, then, was that there are two reasons throughout art’s history as to why someone would want to capture a crunkered in their artwork:
Temperance: They were morally opposed to drunkenness and wanted to make an example out of it.
Or
Prevalence: The artists showed drunk people because that’s what people were actually doing.
TEMPERANCE
While some religions and people consider drinking to be a spiritual experience (maybe some readers agree), most major religions discourage their followers from getting to the point of drunkenness.
Think of a group of people who worshipped drinking. Maybe you immediately thought, ‘Romans?’ or ‘Greeks?’”
That’s a bit of a misconception. While the Greeks had Dionysus, the Romans had Bacchus, but they both heavily discouraged getting slammed. The god of wine and revelry certainly showed up in Greek and Roman art, but the earliest representations showed a bearded, wise, and mature god.
You may have heard of symposiums, and assumed they were outrageous orgies of indulgences. In fact, they were meant to be civilized institutions for men to come together and drink wine.
I found a bit of drinking advice in a play by a Greek poet from the 4th century BC.
I mix three kraters only for those who are wise.
One is for good health, which they drink first.
The second is for love and pleasure.
The third is for sleep, and when they have drunk it, the wise wander homewards.
The fourth is no longer ours, but belongs to arrogance.
The fifth leads to shouting.
The sixth to a drunken revel.
The seventh to black eyes.
The eighth to a summons.
The ninth to bile.
The tenth to madness, in that it makes people throw things.
Now, here’s an example of respectable people drinking at a symposium from the first three kraters by the ancient Greek potter Brygos.
When you look inside the same cup, you see a painting of a very hungover man who had more than his share from the kraters, perhaps as a warning to those who were considering a refill.
Another deity that you might associate with wine, of course, is the one who turned water into wine: Jesus Christ. Jesus, his dad, and the rest of the Biblical cast of characters are featured throughout art’s history and in many portraits. And luckily, because churches were much better at preserving art than secular groups, there’s a ton of Christian-themed art still in existence.
Like the Greeks and Romans, Christians also emphasize drinking in moderation. The bible makes a point of chastising intoxication in two stories.
The first is Lot. As the story goes, his daughters wanted to preserve their family’s line, so they got him blitzed and took turns “laying” with him. Artists took this story and ran with it.
This subject was popular in the 1600s not only for its inherent irony but also for the dramatic contrast between the heightened senses of the daughters and the inebriated state of their father. The biblical theme also provided a righteous pretext for alluding to a titillating taboo.
Personally, if I were an artist, I’d prefer painting Noah. Yes, the two-of-everything-except-unicorns-Noah was also a victim of the vino. After the flood, he planted a vineyard, made wine, and, because he was the first person to drink wine in Biblical history, Noah unknowingly got gobbered on it. When Noah is discovered by one of his sons, he’s not only drunk, he’s naked.
In contrast to Lot, paintings of the drunkenness of Noah are rare, because they show Noah in a poor light. But luckily for us, Michaelangelo included it in his paintings in The Sistine Chapel.
I also found an example in a medieval bible that I just had to share with you. Biblia pauperum (or “Paupers’ Bible”) was basically Bible picture books with little or no text. Here’s one with Noah’s story in it:
(The Noah image is a bit NSFW, and oddly, only a few pages are still hosted on the British Library website. But don’t worry, just head over to the image hosted on Wikipedia, which has a way of holding onto everything and labeling them all phenomenally.)
Generally, the bible looked down on drinking to the point of drunkenness (as do many cultures; see also this scene from the Persian epic, Shahnama). From what I’ve seen, there are 35 bible verses against alcoholic annihilation. For example, Galatians 5:21 says “Envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
With those heavy words, we enter the Medieval period. Between the 5th to 16th centuries, the greatest influence on European art was religion, and frankly, the greatest influence on their daily life. These beliefs certainly came through in artists’ paintings from that time.
Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his unconventional painter of religious visions who focused on the consequences of living a sinful life, including one marked by the gluttony of getting goosed.
His painting style later influenced the Surrealists, and looking at his work, it’s clear to see why.
Here are some examples of the sins you should avoid, according to Bosch, complete with gluttonous offenders.
This one is my favorite: the Ship of Fools. It features, among other things, a man drunkenly vomiting over the side of the boat and a nun and monk, both wasted, eating a pancake from a string. The picture, as you can clearly see, illustrates how Bosch believed drunken fools drifted aimlessly through life.
Another Renaissance artist who immortalized those foolish drunks was Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and satirical peasant scenes. Although he was nicknamed “Peasant Bruegel” because of his subject matter, he was a highly educated man with the same moralistic viewpoint as Bosch.
Though less fantastical, he still emphasized what he found ridiculous and vulgar through his lively compositions of peasants. Please have a look around yourself, there are just so many paintings to love (even though he was trying to make an example out of the apparent euphoric epidemic).
In The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, which deserves inspection under a magnifying glass, he’s showing how people can transition from sinful Carnival on one side to the pious Lent on the other. In it, you can see people going to church on the right side, giving alms, and people on the left side having a grand old time, including someone vomiting out a window, what appears to be a child chugging a beer, and a man covered in meat riding a beer barrel. Incredible.
Later, during the 17th century, dramatic Baroque painting emerged as a way to strengthen the Catholic image… and continue to denounce drunks.
Peter Paul Rubens, the artist you may know for his paintings of (and in favor of) curvy nudes, also painted The Village Wedding as a symbol of gluttony, as evidenced by the subtle symbol of the pig’s snout poking out of the sty on the right.
And by the way, the reason the Catholics were feeling the heat was that a new game was in town: the Protestants.
PREVALENCE
This takes us to the other side of our illustrations of the inebriated: the artists that wanted to capture people drinking because that’s what people were actually doing irl.
No one did this better than the Dutch in the 17th century. It’s said that during the Dutch Golden Age, they produced more portraits than any other people in any other time. It’s estimated that between five and ten million works of art were produced during this time. On the low end, that’s 667 times more paintings than are in the entire Louvre collection.
This realistic style emerged mainly because of the Protestant Reformation, which became centered around the Netherlands. Catholics had all their fun painting the evil sin of getting sloshed, so the Protestants had some catching up to do with their canvases and showed their nationalism with their brushes.
A popular subject during the Dutch Golden Age was genre paintings. While the previous art tended towards historical, biblical, or mythological subjects, genre paintings emphasized the virtues in everyday life. In fact, they’re an evolution of Brugel’s paintings of the everyday. These commonplace subjects allowed artists to experiment with color and composition, and many notable artists cut their teeth by capturing the crunkereds.
The Dutch Golden Age produced painters like Vermeer. This painting is Vermeer’s first genre painting, AND my mom’s favorite painting. She didn’t realize that the woman was drunk, which is fair because the painting is called A Maid Asleep. But, if you go back to the 1696 sale of the picture, it’s described as QUOTE “a drunken, sleeping maid at a table.”
Why would Vermeer pick a passed-out person for his subject? Perhaps because it gave him a still subject that allowed him to experiment with the scene design.
Not only is the tapestry exquisite, x-rays also allow us to see Vermeer’s thought process. He originally included a dog and a gentleman in the painting but painted out the figures. Now, the final result has a poetic image rather than a narrative.
Personally, if we’re talking Dutch genre paintings, I like this one- Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son in the Tavern. Sorry, mom, but it’s just so exuberant, and it’s said to showcase Rembrandt himself and his wife, candidly celebrating.
Another technically great and subjectively awesome artist during the Dutch Golden Age, Jan Steen was known for his humorous genre scenes that were warm-hearted and animated, capturing the interior of an inn, and inside a home. Allegedly, a ’Jan Steen household’ became a Dutch saying for an untidy house or a dysfunctional family.
I also like Frans Hals’ work for his obvious symbolism. Below, this man is pouring the last drop of red wine onto his thumbnail, a signal to the innkeeper that he needs a refill. According to a Dutch rhyme of the period, “Het glas is leegh. De tyd is om” or “The glass is empty. Time is up.”
You can clearly see the owl in this painting below. But in the seventeenth century, owls were often associated with fools or vulgar behavior. AND you can also see the top of a very large tankard, recalling in this woman’s hands a Dutch proverb, “drunk as an owl.” So Frans is clearly calling this woman a drunk fool in her portrait, apparently portraying her as she was.
The genre painting style went all around Europe, to the Spanish painters... and to the British… and even the new Americans!
The idea of painting people as you see them thrashed wasn’t a concept limited to Western artists, of course.
Hokusai, the artist behind the iconic great waves print, is also credited with introducing direct observation of nature and ordinary people into Japanese art. This printmaking style was called Ukiyo-e, which means “pictures of the floating world.”
Hokusai produced thousands of prints of courtesans, actors, landscapes, and images of the daily life of Japanese people. Sometimes, those people (but not the landscapes) were drunk.
His contemporaries like Utamaro and Yoshitosh also captured people in their natural, knackered state. You can see in Hokusai’s drawings that a little bit of social commentary starts to seep in, like the glotounous belly of the sake drinker above. And you might even notice that they are reminiscent of the Pauper’s Bible style.
And back out West, Ukiyo-e prints were collected by many European artists during the 19th century. The European artists used the prints to inspire their work, drawing upon the print’s everyday subjects and subtle parody. Ukiyo-e collectors included artists like Degas, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Now I want to close on Toulouse-Lautrec because it all comes together here, both with him as a person who drank and as a person who painted drunk people living in the vibrant Montmartre. He had a difficult life for many reasons, but painting those around him became an important means of self-expression.
Unable to do the “typical things” assumed of a person in his generation, he immersed himself in art and alcohol, finding his way into the bohemian underground and capturing the candid cacophony that we see in museums today. Strange to say, we wouldn’t have these if it weren’t for inebriation. His work reminds us that intoxication, whether with alcohol, art, or life itself, has always been a subject worth capturing.
As conclusion, I think all these paintings are beautiful in their own way and I hope you’d agree. I found that no one paints drunk people because it makes for a flattering image, but there’s something captivating about the vulnerability of the subjects and even the compulsions of the artist- whether they’re full of religious fervor or joie de vivre.
And what I like most of all is how familiar these feelings are to someone like me, hundreds of years apart. So cheers to all of you, and I wish you many beautiful paintings and vulnerable drinks to come.
