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As the title indicates, the picture expounds the effects of intemperance, and these are made clearly visible in every detail. The master of the house (bearing the artist’s own facial features ) is too busy love-making to care about the chaos that will soon engulf him, the mother is having her pocket picked as she slumbers in a drunken stupor, the dog is eating the meat in the foreground, and the maid, who has stolen a necklace, is entertaining a fiddler. Less obviously, an unwatched roast has fallen into the fire in the next room, a monkey – a symbol of ‘everything sub-human in man, of lust, greed, gluttony and shamelessness in the widest possible sense’– has stopped the clock, and even the oystershells in the foreground are unduly large.