Object data
oil on panel
support: height 35.1 cm × width 33.3 cm
David Teniers (II) (after)
c. 1645
oil on panel
support: height 35.1 cm × width 33.3 cm
…; first recorded in the museum, 1809;1 on loan to the Mauritshuis, 1948-2007; on loan to the Prinsenhof, Delft, since 2007
Object number: SK-A-400
Copyright: Public domain
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 1632/33.2 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 1655.3 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
This portrayal of an elderly man, with a physiognomy seemingly taken from the life, was accepted as the work of David Teniers II until Klinge pointed out in 19914 that it was one of several copies, probably made in Teniers’s studio, the prototype of which is in a Belgian private collection. The present work omits two peasants standing by the fire and a smoking tobacco ember on the floor which has fallen from the broken clay pipe. The handling is clearly of insufficient quality to bring her opinion into question. The prototype was probably executed in the first half of the 1640s, and the present copy, which is about the same size, may be contemporary, a dating that could be confirmed by dendrochronological analysis of the support.
The drinker, who wears a skullcap and holds a stoneware beer kan (tankard), seems to be of the poorer middling sort.
Gregory Martin, 2022
M. Klinge, David Teniers de Jonge. Schilderijen, tekeningen, exh. cat. Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) 1991, under no. 31
1809, p. 70, no. 299 (as Teniers); 1843, p. 59, no. 309; 1853, p. 27, no. 273 (fl. 2000); 1858, pp. 157-58, no. 304; 1880, pp. 421-22, no. 493; 1887, p. 166, no. 1406; 1904, p. 163, no. 2294; 1934, p. 276, no. 2294; 1976, p. 536, no. A 400
G. Martin, 2022, 'after David (II) Teniers, Elderly Man Seated in a Tavern, c. 1645', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6783
(accessed 14 November 2024 07:22:23).