Cavaliers - Public domain painting

Gerard Ter Borch II (1617-1681) was first trained by his father Gerard Ter Borch the Elder before going to Amsterdam in 1634 as an apprentice to the landscape painter Pieter de Molijn (1595-1661). He joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1635 and soon went travelling in Europe until the early 1640s. He then moved to Deventer where he settled definitively at the end of the 1640s. He made few historical subjects and produced chiefly scenes of everyday life including scenes of skaters, soldiers and markets, high-life interior subjects and portraits. His genre paintings had a considerable influence on such contemporaries as Gabriël Metsu, Pieter de Hooch, en:Frans van Mieris and Johannes Vermeer. He had many pupils among which the most eminent was Caspar Netscher and his oeuvre was extensively copied.
This painting shows a guardroom scene with cavaliers and peasants resting in a domestic interior or a tavern. Unlike many Dutch painters who depicted soldiers, Ter Borch was familiar with them from personal experience. His native city, Zwolle and Deventer where he permanently settled in 1654 both housed garrisons because they were situated along the strategic defence lines established during the war with the Spanish. The date inscribed on the painting by a probable later hand, 1638, is consistent with the style of the painting but at that time, Ter Borch was still travelling in Europe. He most likely executed this painting during the early 1640s, once he was back in the Netherlands and witnessed the end of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).