Guardroom

Entry

The 1903 museum catalogue pointed out that the support originally measured 48 x 60 cm; this refers to the central core canvas (fig. a). The inner support was most probably trimmed or cut. Four strips of canvas and the square piece in the top right-hand corner were very probably added while the inner piece was being lined (or the inner piece was lined in order that it could be enlarged). The handling of the foreground elements in the central canvas seems typical of David Teniers II; its dating is discussed below. This much can be said despite the discoloured varnish, which, however, must qualify the negative remarks about the status of work on the outer pieces of canvas, which follow. But unworthy of the artist are the two standing soldiers before the landscape, which in itself is barely worked up. Similarly doubtful are the two men at the right of the far card table; indeed the status of the group could best be determined by cleaning. There are weaknesses too in the rendering of the accoutrements of war in the bottom right hand corner.

The signature is unusually placed, whereas it would conform more with the artist’s usual practice if the right-hand and bottom edges of the inner canvas were the approximate, original edge. As it seems to be authentic, its placement would suggest that the composition on the central core more or less represented Teniers’s original intention. Thus the enlargement was probably the work of a pasticheur intent on making the painting more impressive on a scale, for instance, of the Guardroom (on panel, 69 x 103 cm) of 1642 in the State Hermitage Museum, which was in an Amsterdam sale in 1738.⁹ A likely candidate is Jacques Ignatius de Roore (1686-1747), who sold the painting to Willem Lormier (1682-1758); he was described soon after his death as ‘quite competent in repairing old paintings or enlarging pieces … it takes a highly knowledgeable eye to distinguish the additions from the Original.’¹⁰

The pasticheur – whether De Roore or not – may have had the 1642 Guardroom in mind when he introduced the landscape view beyond the archway. Perhaps too he was influenced by the Guardroom now in the Art Institute Chicago¹¹ – although its whereabouts before the later part of the eighteenth century is not known – where the arrangement of the accoutrements of war is similar although more objects are placed to the left of the drum; here too the card players in the middle distance are like those he depicted by the archway leading outside.

The guardroom as depicted in the central canvas conforms to the artist’s usual treatment of the genre with the lantern suspended to the left or right of centre (without showing its fixture to the ceiling), also only to one side are displayed accoutrements of war, laid out in a manner probably inspired by Jan Brueghel I’s more elaborate displays in allegories of Touch or Fire.¹² As in the Guardroom, no. 820 of the Munich Alte Pinakothek on exhibition in the Staatsgalerie Neuburg an der Donau,¹³ Teniers depicts two kettle drums, a pair of holsters (empty in the case of the Rijksmuseum picture), a helmet (a ‘lobster tailed pot’) and cuirass on a stand, also a shield, breastplates and a pauldron and vambrace.¹⁴ In the present picture a saddle has also been included. The standard, similar in the both paintings, can be identified as showing in part the red, raguly cross of Burgundy, the martial emblem of Spain.¹⁵

So far as the date of the present painting is concerned, it should be pointed out that it was not Teniers’s practice to place the date after his signature, but often in the case of interiors on a drawing fixed to a wall. In fact, Ige Verslype in her condition report considers that none of the digits in the date is original, and already in 1979, Klinge¹⁶ pointed out that a date of execution in the 1640s was improbable. She then suggested a likely date in the ‘späten 1660/70er Jahre’ and now believes that sometime in the early 1670s would be more acceptable.¹⁷ Comparable in handling is the Inn Scene of 1670, in Vaduz-Vienna, The Princely Collections;¹⁸ Renger has dated the very similar Guardroom at Neuburg an der Donau to the beginning of this decade.¹⁹

Liedtke pointed out the originality of Teniers’s treatment of the guardroom genre,²⁰ which seems to have owed little to the theme as created in the late 1620s in the northern Netherlands by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Jacob Duck (1600-1667).²¹ Their work seems not to have been represented in Antwerp collections, as far as can be gauged by the inventories printed by Duverger. Rather Teniers’s development of the genre – which subject was discussed in Philip Angels’s Het Lof der Schilder-Konst of 1642 anticipated this publication by a year or two²² – and seems to have grown out of depictions of the Liberation of St Peter, although the setting of one of his earliest guardrooms²³ was not the stone vaulted antechamber to St Peter’s cell that Teniers came to favour. The rooms are closed off at the rear seemingly in all but the Hermitage Guardroom of 1642.

The Rijksmuseum picture was probably executed at a time of peace in the Spanish Netherlands, following the Treaty of Aachen of 1668, which had accorded King Louis XIV of France further acquisitions of its territory. At all events, by the 1670s the use of armour was in decline, so its inclusion in the museum picture and in that at Neuburg an der Donau was approaching an anachronism.²⁴

Gregory Martin, 2022