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December 2

Behaviour of a monkey in this painting

What would you say the monkey dressed in yellow and red, in the foreground, is doing in this painting?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Teniers_(II)_-_Smoking_and_drinking_monkeys.jpg 194.120.133.17 (talk) 23:17, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Preparing to grind more tobacco for his friends to smoke? Clarityfiend (talk) 01:13, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Or is collecting the ground tobacco in a paper? Tobacco was supplied as whole dried and pressed leaves that had to be prepared at home. Alansplodge (talk) 16:38, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Based on the attire and attitude, the foreground monkey is not a member of the jolly company but a servant or perhaps the innkeeper. --Lambiam 10:23, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, this wikicode:
[[:File:David Teniers (II) - Smoking and drinking monkeys.jpg]]
makes a nice wikilink to the image:
File:David Teniers (II) - Smoking and drinking monkeys.jpg
--CiaPan (talk) 19:16, 3 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Amsterdam Pipe Museum states "we can hardly imagine how difficult it was to get your pipe lit. Our seventeenth-century ancestors used a coal, removed from the open fire with a fire tong and handed it in a brazier. With the fireplace tongs or a smaller one you could put a glowing coal on the pipe bowl." I think the monkey is crouched over a brazier, and the two little sticks propped up in the brazier are a tiny pair of tongs, another pair being in use by the monkey at the table. The monkey of interest certainly appears to be doing something with tobacco and paper, over the hot brazier. I don't know what.

In fact I'm not even right about the tongs: in this similar painting the same objects are clearly stick-like. But I think they hold embers somehow. There's a lot of them, I count 10, so presumably they're consumable, something like a Splint (laboratory equipment)?

Looking through Teniers's many paintings of smokers (there's a commons category), I see many figures doing the exact same thing over a little pottery brazier. #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6. Some are apparently rubbing the tobacco (what's meant by "ready-rubbed"?) but some are just heating it and placidly staring at it. Card Zero (talk) 09:25, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Drying it, perhaps? Johnbod (talk) 16:28, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps, but why do they all have wet tobacco? Perhaps the idea is to make the fragments shrivel up so they pack more densely into the pipe. Card Zero (talk) 16:32, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It might be much fresher than we get it, pre-dried, today. Also at this period Netherlandish smokers of the rougher sort typically mixed their (expensive) tobacco with rather dangerous local plants like deadly nightshade, in English going under the rather non-specific term dwale (which we cover very poorly). That might need drying. Johnbod (talk) 16:56, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, that sounds very dangerous (especially the lettuce). I thought Curing of tobacco was always done, and since it involve weeks of drying, sometimes up a chimney, five minutes extra drying seems confusingly futile. But maybe they cut corners on the curing in the early days? Card Zero (talk) 17:41, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, "ready rubbed" means you don't have to rub it with your fingers/ in your palms to break it up into strands. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:49, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is it our erstwhile leader preparing a White Paper for the Tobacco and Vapes Bill? Martinevans123 (talk) 15:31, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]