The painting An Old Man Smoking a Pipe is the only work by Flemish portrait painter and printmaker Wallerant Vaillant in Russian museum collections. However, for a long time the question who painted the picture remained open. The initials F.B. and the year of 1641 in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas made it possible to attribute the picture to Ferdinand Bol — one of Rembrandt’s pupils. This assumption was disproved by Irina Sokolova, the custodian of Dutch arts in the State Hermitage Museum. In her opinion, An Old Man Smoking a Pipe is one of companion compositions by Wallerant Vaillant. The descriptions of these works entitled An Old Man Warming his Hands, with a Laughing Boy to the Right and An Old Man Smoking a Pipe, and a Boy with a Jug and a Wineglass have survived. Both descriptions were signed: W. Vaillant Pinxit et fec.

For a long time the picture was displayed in the house of Count Pavel Stroganov in his country estate of Znamenskoye in the Tambov province. However, it is still unknown how the picture became part of the collection because none of the catalogues of paintings from his collection lists this picture.

Wallerant Vaillant was taught painting by Erasmus Quellinus II, a pupil of the great Dutch painter, Pieter Paul Rubens. Later on, he worked in various European cities: Amsterdam, Frankfurt-on-Mein, Paris and others. Vaillant’s creative work refers to the Dutch and French schools. In his early French period he was famous as a portrayer: he painted members of the Royal Court of Louis XIV. In his later years Vaillant created genre compositions, with the most famous among them being the pictures of young painters involved in copying sculptures or paintings. For instance, the picture Young Man with a Statue of a Cupid.

The painting An Old Man Smoking a Pipe portrays a beggar who warms his hands over a roasting dish and tries to smoke his pipe. A page boy with a jug of wine and a wineglass in his hands is watching him.

This still life in the canvas bears a lot of meaning: a pottery bowl with charcoals, a kindling, a pottery smoking pipe and an oval tobacco box — all are commonplace objects that could be often seen in the Dutch still lifes of the 17th century and are named ‘toebakie’. Not only did they show Dutch fondness for tobacco smoking but also reminded them about the brevity of worldly pleasures.