Master Dürer himself once hung out the little tablet with his famous monogram as a tavern sign over the fantastic ruin, in which he places the birth of Christ in his beautiful engraving of the year 1504, proud to have prepared such a cozy inn for Our Lady and her God-given Child.
But the whole wealth of signs, from the natural simple form of the speaking sign to the most elaborate examples of signs painted or artfully wrought in iron, reveals itself to us later in the realistic pictures of the Dutch painters.
The earliest representation of a speaking sign, where the merchandise itself is still hung out, I have seen in a woodcut illustrating a book printed in Augsburg in 1536: “Hie hebt an das Concilium zu Constanz.”
It is a baker’s sign: large “brezels” on a wooden stick, a primitive precursor of the artful baker’s sign we observe in Jan Steen’s charming picture “The baker Arent Oostwaard” in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. In more modern times the real merchandise is sometimes supplanted by an imitation of the different loafs in wood and neatly painted in natural colors, such as we see in an amusing sign from Borgo San Dalmazzo, a picturesque mountain town near Cuneo in northern Italy.
A similar evolution may be noted in other trade signs: first the real boots, and later a copy in wood, painted red if possible; first the big pitcher and the shining tin tankard decorated with fresh foliage, later the imitation in a wreath of iron leaves. Everywhere in the tavern and kermess scenes painted by Dutch masters, we see real pitchers and tankards hanging over the doors as speaking signs inviting the peasants to enter and partake of a refreshing drink. In northern Germany the “Krug” (pitcher) was so popular as a sign that the landlord was called after it, “Krüger,” to this day a widely spread family name.
Panetteria Borgo San Dalmazzo·
Unfortunately the Dutch artists loved the interior of the tavern still better than its façade, otherwise we should find still more of the old signs in their pictures. Jan Steen, a genius in the art of living as well as in the art of painting, was a brewer’s son and occasionally he played the landlord himself, in 1654, in the tavern “Zur Schlange,” and in 1656 “In der Roskam,” both in Delft. In his latter days, when he had returned to his birthplace, Leyden, where he once was enrolled as a student of the university, he obtained a license from the city fathers “de neringh van openbare herbergh.” Who could deny æsthetic influence to tavern rooms bedecked with genuine Steens? Other artists like Brouwer paid their tavern debts in pictures, and thus created an artistic atmosphere in which young artists like Steen himself felt most naturally at ease.
In a picture in Brussels, “The Assembly of the Rhetoricians,” the president of a debating society reads the prize poem to the peasantry assembled outside a tavern, the speaking sign of which, pitcher and tankard, is hanging out on a large oaken branch. More frequent than this bush is the wreath—known to us already as a sign in antiquity—surrounding the jolly pitcher as we see it in Du Jardin’s sunny picture “The Trumpeter before a Tavern,” in Amsterdam.
David Teniers gives the preference to the half moon and rarely omits to place a pitcher above the signboard. Sometimes he decorates his moon tavern with the escutcheon of Austria and the imperial eagle; for instance, in a picture in Vienna. In his great painting in the Louvre we see a mail-stage-driver’s horn, a kind of hunting-horn, although the master, who died in 1690, did not live to see the mail-coach introduced.