The subject of a few peasants drinking, smoking and chatting was a favourite of Adriaen van Ostade’s. Often men feature in these scenes, but sometimes they also include members of the opposite sex, as in the present painting of 1672. The artist had used the composition of two half-length figures, the woman shown in profile, the man frontally, almost 20 years earlier, in 1653.5 As in that work, this amorous couple are well beyond the first bloom of youth. They were probably based on drawings in Van Ostade’s studio stock. The man, for example, appears in a number of slightly earlier pictures of his; the pose and downward glance are especially close to the drinker in a painting of 1666 in Montpellier.6 In addition to the standard accoutrements in such scenes of flirting couples – the tankard, wine glass and pipe – a waffle has been included on the table. This unusual item also occurs in another painting with a courting pair by Van Ostade, probably from around the same time.7 It may be a play on words, for ‘waffle’ in Dutch is wafel and is similar to waffel (mouth or snout), waffelen (to chat or babble) and waffelaar (waffler). Probably because of the skewed perspective and summary execution of the background, one scholar felt that the Rijksmuseum work had been painted over by a later, less capable hand.8 Although the technical examination provided no evidence of tampering with that part of the composition, one has to conclude that the picture as a whole is a rather perfunctory performance and agree with the assessment Théophile Thoré made when he saw it hanging on a wall in the Van der Hoop collection: ‘A second Adriaen van Ostade, Interior with Two Figures, was hung very high up and looks unimportant’.9 Jonathan Bikker, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements