Nicolas Régnier, Southern Netherlandish
Sure, Joe Had Woken Up Next To a Date With a Burning Sensation Before, But Never Quite Like This, Early 1620s
Oil on canvas
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Info, or perhaps links that point to more info, about this artist can be found here, here (archived if necessary), here (if truncated, can be read in full for free on Fridays), here, here, and here, perhaps in addition to what’s in his Wikipedia page (Google translated Dutch Wikipedia page may have more).
/// The seer leers like a person demented,
as she renders him zonked, but contented.
Rolled-up herbs, (the tip glows),
smoke just under his nose.
Could this be how the joint was invented?
/// He’d paid Doortje his fortune to tell.
Inhibitions she hopes to dispel.
She’ll ask questions to find
insights into his mind.
His tongue loosed by that sharp skunky smell.
/// On the table are cards Doortje “reads.”
Silent client? She rarely succeeds.
Talking gives things away;
for her “insights” they’ll pay.
So there’s hemp in those rolled shredded weeds.
/// Getting high made her client relax,
as his fate and his fortune she tracks.
“Want your future explained?”
No… his interest had waned.
But he did buy some overpriced snacks.
/// The work’s name claims that she will awaken
the male sleeper with fire, (not by shakin’).
Yet her actions seem cruel,
she could wake up the fool
with a smell just by frying some bacon.
/// But a subtitle adds this detail:
“Fortune Teller Scene.” Why is the male
sound asleep in his chair?
There are playing cards there,
but if she pranks her clients she’ll fail.