Rumor erat in Casa (There was a Commotion in the House)

This painting is part of the NELRI series, Troost’s best known work. (The name is derived from the first letters of the Latin inscriptions which accompany the five views of the activities of a group of men during the night of a reunion.) In this series we are shown what happens during a gathering that begins quietly in the early evening and ends well after midnight with the participants dead drunk.

Troost is often called the Dutch Hogarth. They were exact contemporaries, both made formal portraits as well as conversation pieces, the name given to small-scale group portraits in a social setting. Both won fame for their series of genre pictures, which are commentaries on the life of their times, and for pictures of contemporary theatrical performances. Also both are satirists, but here there is a fundamental difference. Troost is never as critical or aggressive as Hogarth. Troost does not moralize. Instead of moralizing on the evils of drink, as Hogarth was wont to do, Troost’s NELRI pictures humorously show the stages as well as the psychological and physiological effects of inebriation. In this respect his spirit differs from Jan Steen’s too. It will be recalled that moralizing was a dominant strain in Steen’s art.