Husbandman at a Cottage Door with a Seated Woman and Child

c. 1650 - c. 1655

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 63.8 cm × width 93.5 cm × thickness 4.3 cm (support incl. backboard)
outer size: depth 6.9 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, bottom right: ·D·TENIERS·FEC

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 13 October 2006

Conservation

H.H. Mertens, 1967: cleaned, lined, repaired, retouched and varnished

Provenance

…; collection Gerret Braamcamp (1699-1771), Amsterdam (‘Een Buitenhuis en Landschap meet beelden, door denzelven [David Teniers] h. 2 v. 2 en een half d. br. 3 v. 3 d. [in the frame, 64.2 x 94.1 cm] D.’);¹ his sale, Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 31 July 1771, no. 219 (‘Teniers, (David) H. 25, br. 36 d. [65.4 x 94.1 cm] Een heerlyk Landschap; op den Voorgrond die met kruiken, vaatwerk, ketels en ander gereedschap gestoffeerd is, staat een Boeren wooning, waar voor eene Boerin met een kind op den schoot; zy schynt met een Tuynman, die een spade in de hand heeft, te spreecken, die haar eenige Groenten gebracgt heeft, en welke rondom haar liggen. In ’t verschiet ziet men Gebergten, een Dorp en verschiede Passagiers’), fl. 2,100, to Diodati;²…; ? the dealer Albertus Brondgeest; from whom, fl. 3,381, to Adriaan van der Hoop, Amsterdam (1778-1854), 1834;³ by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam with 223 other paintings, 1854;⁴ on loan to the museum from the City of Amsterdam, since 30 June 1885; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2004-11⁵

Object number: SK-C-299

Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop Bequest)

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 1632/33.⁶ 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 1655.⁷ 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

There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of this signed work which has been dated by Klinge to the first half of the 1650s.⁸ The window panes were rendered using the sgraffito technique.

The gathering in this rustic scene is unusually enigmatic and its intended meaning remains unclear. The Braamcamp catalogue describes the man as a gardener who had brought the peasant woman vegetables. The 1976 collection catalogue described the pair as a peasant and his wife and child. For Klinge the scene depicted a prosperous farmer and his family. Certainly the protagonists have a refined air despite the humble setting, and the child wears a valhoed,⁹ typical protective headgear worn by the children of well-to-do families; the same model for the mother appears in the foreground of the State Hermitage Museum Peasant Wedding of 1650.¹⁰ The possibility arises that she was intended as a wet nurse.

Klinge correctly viewed the scene as one of ‘rural fecundity and abundance’; her claim that it ‘stressed the positive strength of the peasantry on whom hope for the economic welfare of the people must depend’,¹¹ is perhaps overambitious. The nostalgic tone of Virgil’s Georgics could perhaps be better associated with it, especially the passage in which the life of the ‘happy husbandman’ is extolled: ‘O happy husbandman! Too happy, should they come to know their blessings! For whom, far from the clash of arms, most righteous Earth, unbidden, pours forth from her soil an easy sustenance … Theirs is repose without care, and a life that knows no fraud but is rich in treasures manifold … Among them, as she quitted the earth, Justice planted her latest steps.’¹²

The arrangement of household goods and vegetables stems from Teniers’s earliest activity.¹³ The vegetables are all autumnal root crops. The object hanging from the fence post is a portable cage to house a decoy owl. Klinge believed that the spade was an attribute of Hope; but it is better regarded as an attribute of Labour.¹⁴

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

M. Klinge, David Teniers de Jonge. Schilderijen, tekeningen, exh. cat. Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) 1991, no. 80

Collection catalogues

1885, p. 107, no. 212; 1887, p. 165, no. 1409; 1903, p. 259, no. 2297; 1934, p. 277, no. 2297; 1976, p. 536, no. C 299

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'David (II) Teniers, Husbandman at a Cottage Door with a Seated Woman and Child, c. 1650 - c. 1655', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5567

(accessed 20 September 2024 08:22:33).