“Why Are There So Many 17th Century Paintings of Monkeys Getting Drunk?”, 2017-05-04 ():
One cold Friday in 1660, Samuel Pepys encountered two unpleasant surprises. “At home found all well”, he wrote in his diary, “but the monkey loose, which did anger me, and so I did strike her.” Later that night, a candlemaker named Will Joyce (the good-for-nothing husband of one of Pepys’s cousins) stumbled in on Pepys and his aunt while “drunk, and in a talking vapouring humour of his state, and I know not what, which did vex me cruelly.” Presumably, Pepys didn’t resort to blows this time around.
The two objects of Pepys’ scorn that day, his disobedient pet monkey and his drunken cousin-in-law, were not as distant as one might think. Monkeys stood in for intoxicated humans on a surprisingly frequent basis in 17th century culture. In early modern paintings, tippling primates can frequently be seen in human clothing, smoking tobacco, playing cards, rolling dice, and just plain getting wasted.
Why?
…So what is going on with these images showing drunken and drug-selling monkeys? I think that what we’re missing when we simply see these as a form of social satire is that these are also paintings about addiction. Desire is a dominant theme in these works: monkeys are shown jealously squabbling over piles of tobacco, or even, in the example below, hoarding tulip flowers during the height of the Dutch tulipmania (they appear to be using the profits to get drunk, in the upper left)…But there’s an alternative narrative running through these paintings as well. It epitomizes the ambivalence that has long surrounded intoxicating substances, in many cultures and in many times: These monkeys seem to be having fun.