Dutch or Italian school; 17th century.

Dutch or Italian school; 17th century.
"Comic characters".
Oil on panel.
It has frame of the nineteenth century.
Measurements: 27 x 21 cm; 36 x 31 cm (frame).
The costumbrismo played a fundamental role in the painting of the XVII century, especially in the Italian and Dutch schools, where it was consolidated as an essential way for the representation of the daily life and the social structures of the period. In a context marked by intense political, religious and economic transformations, artists began to move away from the great heroic or exclusively religious themes to focus on scenes of common life, charged with direct observation and critical or satirical overtones. In Italy, costumbrismo developed particularly in the field of Caravaggist naturalism, with depictions of popular types, musicians, peddlers or market scenes, which endowed painting with an unprecedented visual immediacy and emotional charge. For its part, in the Netherlands, and especially in the Dutch Republic, this genre acquired great prominence in the context of the bourgeois boom, consolidating itself as a reflection of the moral, labor and domestic values of the new middle class. Painters such as Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch or Gerard ter Borch developed scenes of interiors, taverns or festivities that not only document the way of life of the time, but also explore human relationships and social behaviors.