Saturday’s ad is for Heineken, from 1976. In the later 1970s, Heineken embarked on a series of ads with the tagline “Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach.” Many of the ads were in a sequential panel, or comic strip, format and they were intended to be humorous.
In this ad, a three-panel format, a drinking dutchman holds a mug of Heineken, and is ready to painted by the numbers. Only his beer has been colored. In the second panel, he’s started to drink and color is spreading out from his head to the background. After he’s emptied the mug, he’s fully colored, and so is the background. If Only I could paint a room that easily.
The Laughing Cavalier is a portrait by the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals in the Wallace Collection in London, which has been described as “one of the most brilliant of all Baroque portraits”
The joke is obvious. Without Heineken, he is just paint by numbers.