In 1672, the Year of Disaster, Van Ostade packed his belongings and tried to flee Haarlem for Lubeck. He got as far as Amsterdam, where the art collector Konstantyn Sennepart talked him into staying. He remained in the city for a time, producing a series of coloured drawings in Sennepart's house, then returned to Haarlem. He had been there his entire life and would stay until the end.

He was born in Haarlem in 1610, the eldest son of a weaver from the hamlet of Ostade near Eindhoven. He and his younger brother Isaack (also a painter) adopted "van Ostade" as a professional name. Both studied under Frans Hals, though neither absorbed much of Hals's style. The stronger influence on Adriaen was Adriaen Brouwer, whose earthy peasant scenes and tavern interiors set the template that Van Ostade refined over five decades.

His subjects were the daily activities of common people: peasants drinking, smoking, fighting, making music, gathering at fairs. The early paintings are rough and dark; as his career progressed, the interiors became lighter, the compositions more carefully arranged, the figures less grotesque. He was enormously productive. Estimates of his total output range from 385 to over 900 paintings, and at his death his studio contained more than two hundred unsold works.

In 1657 he married Anna Ingels, a wealthy Catholic woman from Amsterdam, and appears to have converted to Catholicism himself. He continued painting without decline into old age; two of his latest dated works, from 1676, show no weakening. He was buried in Haarlem in 1685, at seventy-four.