SP 4174

 

DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER

Antwerp 1610 - 1690 Brussels

 

A landscape with a farmhouse, a maid by a well and a peasant eating mussels, chatting to another peasant with his dog

 

Signed lower right: D. TENIERS . F.

Canvas: 19 ¾ x 25 7/8 in / 50.2 x 65.7 cm

 

Painted in the early 1650s

Provenance:

Mrs Barnard, Cave Castle, South Cave, East Yorkshire

Sale Christie’s London, 12^th June 1925, lot 103

Sale Fievez, Brussels, 30^th April 1947, lot 57, pl.XXII

Private collector, Belgium;

by descent to his daughter

 

 

Dr Margret Klinge dates this delightful painting to the early 1650s, when Teniers was at the height of his powers. Famous as a painter of genre, since 1647 Teniers had been working in his home city of Antwerp for the Habsburg Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1662), son of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1651 Leopold Wilhelm brought Teniers to Brussels as his Court Painter and Curator, where he remained for the rest of his life.

 

The fluid effect of light, strong, clear colours in the foreground figures and brilliantly facility of execution are typical of Teniers’s early Brussels period. Peasant scenes had been a staple of Teniers’s work from the beginning of his career, but by the 1650s he had refined the peasant genre to appeal to his courtly clientèle and to reflect his own enhanced social standing (successful in his own right, he had allied himself with a famous artistic dynasty by marriage in 1637 to Anna, the daughter and heiress of Jan Brueghel the Elder).

 

Teniers’s earliest peasant scenes had been inspired by the work of the brilliant, short-lived Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638), who explored the rough and earthy aspects of peasant existence. This painting is a more idealised, although still gently humorous, view of country life. A peasant in a red, feathered cap gobbles mussels while a pretty kitchen maid and an older man look on. Teniers pokes fun at the man’s gluttony, and perhaps also his lustfulness, as shellfish were thought to be aphrodisiac (though the peasant is singularly oblivious to the maid). An owl (symbol of foolishness in the seventeenth century) watches from a fence. Above is one of Teniers’s stock characters, the old woman staring from a high window, cynical and silent commentator on mankind’s follies.

 

Although Teniers’s figures are humble, the beauty of his painting technique gives them their fascination. The interplay of colours in the figure group – the lovely shell pink of the maid’s jacket, the blue clothes of the man to the left, and the multicoloured glutton – are harmonised just as exquisitely as in his paintings of Brussels aristocrats. From the 1650s Teniers became an increasingly subtle observer of buildings in landscape. The light pouring onto the warm brick of the farmhouse chimney, the valley and church irradiated with shafts of sun and shadow, reflect the increasing airiness in Teniers’s work of the Brussels period. A breeze makes the leaves shimmer and a shepherd contentedly tends his flock, reinforcing the impression of a basically harmonious rural world. Like his friend Rubens, increasing prosperity allowed Teniers to buy a country estate, ‘Dry Toren’ (Three Towers), at Perk outside Brussels in 1662, where he could indulge his love of nature to the full.

 

In composition this painting can be compared to the Peasant family before their house (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no.C299)[1], which also dates from the first half of the 1650s, when the end of the Thirty Years’ War had brought new hopes of prosperity to the countryside. It shares with the present painting a large farmhouse and figure group on the left, with a landscape of distant, rolling hills and a church.

DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER

Antwerp 1610 - 1690 Brussels

 

 

David Teniers the Younger was one of the most important seventeenth century Flemish painters of genre and landscape. Born in Antwerp, he first studied with his father David Teniers the Elder (1582-1649), and became a member of the Guild of St Luke in 1633. He married Anna Brueghel, daughter and heiress of the celebrated flower and landscape painter Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), in 1637. Anna’s guardian Peter Paul Rubens was a signatory to their marriage contract.

 

Married into a famous dynasty of painters and highly successful in his own right, Teniers gained social prominence and prestigious offices, such as his appointment as Master of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament in St Jacobskerk between 1637 and 1639. Between 1645 and 1646 he was Dean of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke. By 1647 he was working for the Habsburg Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1662), son of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1651, when Teniers was at the height of his powers, Leopold Wilhelm brought Teniers to Brussels as his Court Painter and Curator, giving him an authoritative role in building up the royal collection, which founded what is today the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. From 1656-59 Teniers was Court Painter to the new Spanish Governor, Don Juan of Austria, brother of Philip IV of Spain, and retained close ties with the court for the rest of his life. In 1663 Philip IV gave Teniers permission to found the highly influential Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. His last known dated work was painted in 1683; Teniers died in Brussels in 1690.

 

Teniers’s early works were influenced by Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638), particularly his treatment of peasant, low-life subjects and interior scenes, although he also painted landscapes, genre, portraits, religious and allegorical subjects. Later, Teniers turned increasingly to landscapes with figures; unlike his predecessors, however, he sought to convey the serenity of rural life rather than the more basic aspects of rustic realism. The works of Teniers were extremely influential on Flemish painting during his lifetime and beyond, and his paintings were avidly collected by princely connoisseurs.

 

The work of David Teniers the Younger is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the Louvre, Paris; the Prado, Madrid; the National Gallery, London and the Wallace Collection, London.