Rest at the trattoria

Pieter van Bloemen's Rest at the Trattoria, painted in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, is a genre scene by a Flemish painter who spent much of his career in Rome, where he became one of the leading painters of the Bamboccianti tradition — the Northern European artists working in Rome who specialized in scenes of everyday Italian popular life. Van Bloemen, nicknamed 'Standaart' for his paintings of military standards and horses, also produced scenes of Roman tavern life, peasant gatherings, and street scenes that documented the social world of the city's lower classes. The trattoria scene belongs squarely in this tradition of sympathetic genre painting of ordinary Italian life that Dutch and Flemish artists had developed in Rome since the mid-seventeenth century.

The trattoria scene deploys the warm, earthy palette characteristic of the Bamboccianti genre, with figures rendered in natural light. The interior or courtyard setting of the trattoria provides the compositional framework for the grouped figures eating and drinking. The handling is loose and descriptive.