Happy Brothers

Happy Brothers, Their Poor Mother! (often referred to simply as Happy Brothers) is an 1887 oil painting by the Serbian artist Uroš Predić. It shows four intoxicated youths walking through their village whilst the mother of one shouts her disapproval from the distance. The painting is said to have been inspired by a frequent sight in Predić's home village of Orlovat—that of drunken youths returning from the pub at dawn. Predić painted the composition hoping it would persuade the villagers to change their ways. He was disappointed that it not only failed to decrease the incidence of drunkenness in Orlovat, but was well received by the villagers themselves, who were happy merely to have been depicted.

One art historian suggests the painting was influenced by the works of Rosa Bonheur and Gustave Courbet, while another believes it was informed by those of the satirists William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. The painting's humorous content contributed to its popularity among critics, collectors and the public at large, which led to Predić painting two replicas in 1918 and 1922. By 1890, the original was owned by the National Museum of Serbia, in whose possession it remains.

Uroš Predić (1857–1953) was one of the most successful 19th- and 20th-century Serbian realists. A native of Orlovat, a village in the Banat region of Austria-Hungary, Predić drew scenes of life in the village throughout his career. One of the more frequent sights during his stays there was of intoxicated young men returning from the pub at dawn and waking up the whole village. In painting the composition, Predić was not only attempting to realistically depict contemporary village life but also to convey a message. "I observed this every day", he explained. "I said to myself there must be some way of telling these people to what an unhappy level they have descended and have a moral impact on them, capturing all the bad habits of my compatriots." Predić had expressed disapproval of the villagers' behavior in an earlier work, Clients in Front of a Lawyer's Door (1886).

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