Birmingham, Birmingham Art Gallery, on loan, by March 1950.

The most important seventeenth-century Flemish painter of peasant life, David Teniers the Younger was both productive and versatile.  Although he specialised in peasant subjects, he also painted high-life, guardroom, religious and mythological scenes, landscapes, allegories, portraits, gallery paintings and monkey satires.  Teniers enjoyed international fame during his lifetime and was held in high esteem by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics and collectors. 

Teniers painted a wide range of peasant themes during the course of his career.  In the 1630s, he painted mostly interior scenes, inspired by the style and subject-matter of Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638), but from around 1640 onwards, open-air scenes began to feature more prominently.  Simple scenes of peasants going about their daily work, or enjoying themselves with games or dancing, entered his repertoire, as well as large, multi-figured depictions of village festivals, and peasant weddings. His interest in such themes was likely stimulated by his association with the Brueghel family.  Through his marriage in 1637 to Anna Brueghel, daughter of the celebrated painter Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), he had come into possession of drawings and paintings by various members of the Brueghel family.  During this period, Teniers made regular excursions into the countryside around Antwerp to sketch from nature.  His drawings of country houses, local sites, figures and animals, many of which have survived, provided him with a rich stock of motifs for his painted compositions. 

Teniers painted the present landscape in the 1640s when he was at the peak of his powers.  Already successful in his own right, his meteoric rise to fame was boosted by his marriage to Anna Brueghel and his ties to Rubens (1577-1640).  His appointment in 1645 as Dean of the Guild of St. Luke was a mark of the respect in which he was held by other members of his profession.  During this period, he secured the support of several prominent patrons, including the discriminating connoisseur of art Anton Triest, Bishop of Ghent, who may have introduced the artist to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Southern Netherlands.  In 1651, Teniers officially entered the Archduke's service as court painter and moved to Brussels, where he remained for the rest of his life.

In this tranquil landscape Teniers presents an idealised view of rural life.  The scene is set on farmland close to a big city[i] whose lofty roofs and spires punctuate the distant skyline.  In the foreground, a group of cows and sheep populates an open piece of ground flanked on either side by farm buildings.  A prosperous-looking farmer converses with a shepherd in a red cap, who is seated on the ground, tying his shoelace.  On the left, a milkmaid at her work chats to a man in blue, leaning on his staff: a large copper jug and pail stand nearby.  The fresh sunny atmosphere and silvery light evoke an idyllic mood.

The pastoral character of this landscape is typical of Teniers’s work from the mature phase of his career.  In contrast to his early peasant scenes that focused upon the uncouth behaviour of his subjects, his paintings of the 1640s bear witness to a very different vision of the common man.  This new interpretation projects an altogether more positive view of the rural classes, stressing the virtues of simple, country life.  The prominence given to such themes in Teniers’s mature work no doubt reflects the contemporary fashion for pastoral literature as well as the tastes of the artist’s elite clientele.

This painting’s interest is enhanced by its distinguished provenance.  The first-known owner of the painting was Louis-Gabriel Peilhon (1700-1762), a counsellor and secretary to Louis XIV of France, who amassed an impressive collection of Dutch, Flemish and French paintings.  By the nineteenth century, the painting had entered the collection of Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1808-1879), where it caught the eye of the famous German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794-1868) on a visit to the Baron’s residence at 148 Piccadilly.  In his Treasures of Art in Great Britain, published four years later, Waagen singled out the Teniers for praise, commenting on the way in which it had been “carefully carried out in the most delicate silvery tones”, and commending its “excellent state of preservation”[ii].

BIOGRAPHY

The son of a painter and art dealer David Teniers the Elder (1582-1649), David the Younger was baptised in Antwerp on 15 December 1610.  He was trained by his father, a specialist in small-scale history subjects, and became a master in the Antwerp guild of St. Luke in 1632/33.  On 22 June 1637, Teniers married Anna Brueghel, daughter of the celebrated painter, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625).  Since Brueghel’s death in 1625, Rubens (1577-1640) had been Anna’s guardian and served as a witness at their wedding.  This alliance brought Teniers both wealth and status.  In July 1638, the first of the couple’s seven children was baptised: the child’s godmother was Rubens’s second wife, Hélène Fourment.  In 1642, the young couple took up residence in Brueghel’s former home, ‘De Meireminne’ (The Siren) in the Lange Nieuwstraat. 

In 1645/46 Teniers was elected Dean of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke.  He was also an active member of the rhetoricians’ chamber De Violieren.  Among the important patrons for whom he worked during the 1640s was Antoon Triest, Bishop of Ghent, who may have introduced Teniers to the newly appointed Governor of the Southern Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.  By 1647, Teniers had entered the Archduke’s service at his court in Brussels, although he continued to live in Antwerp.  In 1651, Teniers succeeded Jan van den Hoecke (1611-1651) as official count painter and moved to Brussels.  In 1651, he travelled to London to purchase paintings from the former collection of Charles I and painted a series of interior views of Leopold Wilhelm’s gallery of paintings.  He also embarked upon an ambitious project to produce an illustrated catalogue of the Italian pictures in the archducal collection.  To this end, he painted small-scale copies of the Archduke’s paintings which served as modelli for the 243 engravings, eventually published at the artist’s expense in 1660, four years after Leopold Wilhelm’s return to Vienna.  His other royal patrons included Philip IV of Spain, Queen Christina of Sweden, James II of England and William of Orange. 

In 1656, Teniers, who by then had become very wealthy, purchased a magnificent house in Brussels.  On 21 October 1656, less than six months after the death of his first wife, he married Isabelle de Fren, daughter of the secretary of the Council of Brabant.  In 1658, Teniers was elevated to the rank of ayuda de cámara (chamberlain) under Don Juan of Austria, who had replaced Leopold Wilhelm in Brussels.  In 1662, Teniers bought a country house called Dry Toren (Three Towers) near Vilvoorde.  In 1664, he was instrumental in founding an academy of painting in Antwerp.  Teniers continued working well into old age - the latest dated painting is of 1683 - and died in Brussels in April 1690, aged 79. 

Teniers often collaborated with other painters, including Lucas van Uden (1595-1672/73), Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606-1683/84), Jacques d’Arthois (1613-1686), and Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626-1679).