In August 1622, the young guests that attended the wedding party of Manuel Colyn and Catharina Cloppenburgh would have been smokers; or at the least, they would have known the lyrics to the song ‘Lof van de toback’ [In Praise of Tobacco], written by Jan Jansz Starter. The lyrics describe how wonderful it is to take a puff of tobacco. In another poem in his bestselling songbook Friesche Lust-Hof [Frisian Paradise] (1621), which he published a year earlier, Starter included a snappy verse about how Jupiter encouraged the other gods to start smoking tobacco. In the poem, Jupiter enjoys sipping a beer and smoking from his pipe. These were two bad habits that went hand in hand. At weddings and garden parties, young people amused themselves by reciting poems and singing songs. In the early seventeenth century, Starter's was one of the most popular songbooks of the period. His lyrics were certainly not moralistic and they had a salacious undertone. When Friesche Lust-hof was first published, Starter was only 27 years old, not much older than the young people for whom he wrote. His poems and lyrics were the ultimate form of entertainment. The topics that he wrote about were popular; and in the 1620s, smoking tobacco was the latest fad among the young.

A new trend

The new fashion among the young also became a new subject and attribute for artists. In his painting The Merry Company (circa 1620-1622), Willem Buytewech portrayed three young men and a woman sitting around a table with a tobacco pipe lying in the middle. The ‘merry company’ genre was very popular in the early seventeenth century. Such paintings often portrayed wealthy young men dressed in the latest fashions, playing cards, drinking wine, and flirting with pretty girls. As a new symbol of all the vanities of life, painters in the early seventeenth century added a tobacco pipe to the scene. Buytewech's Merry Company was the epitome of la dolce vita of modern young people.

The characters portrayed were the rich children of foreignborn merchants who had become wealthy in the Dutch Republic and spoiled their offspring with worldly goods.