Object data
oil on panel
support: height 30.8 cm × width 23.4 cm
outer size: depth 3.5 cm (support incl. frame)
David Teniers (II)
The Temptation of St Anthony
c. 1645
Inscriptions
- signature, bottom right: D.TENIERS.F
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 13 December 2006
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 7 September 2007
Conservation
- conservator unknown, 1874: restored
Provenance
…; ? collection Joan de Walé [Joan de Wael, 1620-91], Heer van Anckeveen;1 collection of his granddaughter, Jkvr. Maria Elisabeth de Walé van Anckeveen (1691-1753); from whom purchased privately by Gerret Braamkamp (1699-1771), by 1752;2 collection Gerret Braamkamp (1699-1771), Amsterdam (‘Een St. Antoni temptatie, door David Teniers. h. 1 v. 2 d. br. 10 d. [in frame, 34 x 26.5 cm]’);3 transferred to Herengracht 462, Sweenderyck, (‘Premier chamber à gauche […] David Teniers Peint sur bois, haut de 12 pouces, large de 9½. [32.4 x 25.7 cm] Le sujet de ce Tableau est la Tentation de St. Antoine, rempli de monstres & de spectres. Il vient du Cabinet de Madame D’Anckeveen’);4 his sale, Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 31 July 1771 sqq., no. 224 (‘Teniers, (David). H. 12, br. 9½ d. Pnl. De Verzoeking van den H. Antonius. ’t Stuk is opgepropt met wangedrochten en spookagtige verbeeldingen’), fl. 255, to the dealer Peter Fouquet Jr;5…; ? collection Hendrick Bicker (1722-1783), Amsterdam; his son Jan Bernd Bicker (1746-1812);6 anonymous sale [Bicker], Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 19 July 1809, no. 557 (‘Teniers D In een Rotsgezicht vertoont zig een Kluisenaar, eerbiedig nedergeknield met zaamgevouwen handen, voor een opengeslagen Boek, tegen een Doodshoofd rustende, der zijde staat een aarden Kan, op den voorgrond gestofferd met verscheide Helsche Monsters en om hoog vliegende Gedrogten. […] op paneel. hoog 12 breed 9 duim [31.4 x 19.5 cm]’), fl. 150, to the dealer Jan Yver, for the museum;8 on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1999-2011
Object number: SK-A-401
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
David Teniers II (Antwerp 1610 - Brussels 1690)
The prolific, highly successful small-scale figure and landscape painter David Teniers II was the eldest son of the artist David Teniers I and Dymphna de Wilde; he was baptized in the Sint-Jacobskerk, Antwerp, on 15 December 1610. Taught by his father, he became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1632/33.9 His first, extant signed and dated picture is of 1633 in which year he took on the first of his four Antwerp apprentices. On 22 June 1637 he married Anna Brueghel (1620-1656), the daughter of Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625), in a ceremony at which Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a witness; she brought property and wealth to the marriage. He was appointed dean of the guild of St Luke for the year 1645/46.
The following years saw his first contacts with the important collectors, Antoon Triest, Bishop of Ghent, and still more significantly, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, whose court painter he became in 1651. Teniers settled in Brussels, and by 1657 was further appointed ‘ayuda da camera’ at the archducal court; his duties consisted in advising on the great range of artistic purchases made by the archduke particularly from the sales of the collections of the executed King Charles I of Great Britain and of the duke of Hamilton (1606-1644). He was sent to England by the count of Fuensaldaña (1603-1661) for this purpose between 1651 and 1655.10 For the archduke he also painted capriccio views of the display of his picture collection and prepared an etched catalogue of his Italian paintings, the Theatrum Pictorium, published in 1660. In 1656 following the death of his wife, he married Isabella de Fren. In the same year, his position as court painter to Leopold Wilhelm’s successor was confirmed; but it lapsed in 1659 under the next incumbent, with whom, however, Teniers was on friendly terms.
By 1662 he had bought the estate of Perk and the country house Dry Toren, not far from Het Steen – the property which Rubens had bought in 1635 – from Helena Fourment’s second husband, Jan-Baptist van Brouchoven van Bergeyck. Teniers was instrumental in obtaining from King Philip IV of Spain the charter to found a painters’ academy in Antwerp which was granted in 1663. He continued to work and sell paintings from his house in Brussels, in spite of objections from the Brussels guild of St Luke. In 1663 he was granted the noble status he had greatly desired. But his art was to become less popular and out of fashion, and his last years were marred by financial disputes with the children of his first marriage, so that he died in poverty. He was buried probably on 25 April 1690 in Brussels; his place of burial is not known.
REFERENCES
Klinge in M. Klinge and D. Lüdke (eds.), David Teniers der Jüngere 1610-1690: Alltag und Vergnügen in Flandern, exh. cat. Karlsruhe (Staatlichen Kunsthalle Karlsruhe) 2005-06, pp. 14-19; H. Vlieghe, David Teniers (1610-1690): A Biography, Turnhout 2011
Entry
St Anthony Abbot, an Egyptian hermit, and the founder of monasticism, died aged 105 in 356 CE. He is shown wearing the black habit of an Augustinian and is to be identified by his attribute, a Tau cross sewn on his cowl. The saint’s temptations by the devil were recounted in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend: ‘And anon they [temptations] came in the form of divers beasts wild and savage, of whom one howled, another sniffled and another cried and another brayed and assailed S. Anthony.’11 The devilish phantoms that were to torment the saint in the later Netherlandish tradition owed much to the inventions of Hieronymus Bosch (1440/60-1516).12
There is no reason to doubt David Teniers II’s execution of the present picture depicting a theme which was popular with the artist from his early activity until the 1660s, and which he rendered in both vertical and horizontal formats. The basic formula he followed was established in his earliest dated example of 1634: the elderly, bearded saint is shown kneeling in a grotto distracted from reading a holy book, presumably the Bible, usually propped against a Crucifix.13 The Rijksmuseum picture is one of a smaller category in which a prominent she-devil in contemporary costume is absent. The details of the physiognomy of the saint’s face here seem not exactly repeated in other versions, but it relates closely to that in the Dresden picture, dated by Klinge to the mid-1640s.14 The present picture is probably of about the same time;15 the exceptionally thin support of a single piece of oak timber is from a tree grown in the Baltic/Polish region which would have been ready for use from 1634.
In this picture the saint’s chief assailant is a bearded, capped devil, who points out of the picture space to divert him, as on other occasions in Teniers’s oeuvre.16 The characteristics of this figure are unique in Teniers’s extant treatments of the theme. His physiognomy relates closely to an equally prominent devil in a similarly composed Temptation that was acquired by the Berlin Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (now Bode-Museum) as the work of Brouwer, but is no longer accepted as such.17
A Temptation of St Anthony by Brouwer was listed as no. 280 in the 1640 inventory of pictures in Peter Paul Rubens’s collection after his death, but has since been lost sight of.18 Thus its relation to the Berlin picture and to the Rijksmuseum account of the subject is hypothetical. Whether the devil-tempter in the Berlin picture was an invention of Brouwer’s is an open question; but the similarity of the two faces points to a common source, which may have been the lost painting by Brouwer.
In two of his Temptation renderings, Teniers introduced personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins as the saint’s assailants.19 In the present picture, as in the majority of others by Teniers, the grotesque and fantastic devil humans and animals – including those in the variegated aerial jousts above20 – probably had no specific meanings such as seem to have been attached to them by Bosch in his Temptation of St Anthony at Lisbon. At least according to Bax, who gives antecedents and interpretations for the aerial combatants, the devil with a beak, the funnel and the fish.21 Rather Teniers’s intentions were probably accurately conveyed in the rubric to the print by Frans van den Wijngaerde (1614-1679): ‘Blessed is the man who endureth temptation for he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him... (Beatus vir qui suffert tentationem: quoniam cum probatus fuerit, Accipiet coronam vitae, quam Repromisit Deus diligentibus....)’.22
The first certain owner of this Temptation of St Anthony was a member of the wealthy de Walé family, who as Catholics in Protestant Holland would have maintained the tradition of the veneration of saints.
Gregory Martin, 2022
Collection catalogues
1809, p. 70, no. 303; 1843, p. 59, no. 312 (fl. 2000); 1853, p. 27, no. 275; 1858, p. 139, no. 307; 1872, p. 158, no. 330; 1880, p. 422, no. 492; 1885, p. 73, no. 494; 1887, p. 165, no. 1407; 1897, p. 163, no. 1407 (494); 1903, p. 258, no. 2295; 1934, p. 277, no. 2295; 1976, p. 336, no. A 401
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'David (II) Teniers, The Temptation of St Anthony, c. 1645', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5568
(accessed 20 September 2024 17:17:59).