Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2024 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)

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

::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)

::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)

: 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)

:The [https://pipemuseum.nl/en/vuurmaken-aansteken 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 [https://pipemuseum.nl/en/collection/apm-20-754 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)

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

:::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)

::::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)

:::::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)

::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)

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