DAVID TENIERS
There is at the Louvre no picture by the elder David Teniers (1582–1649), who therefore only interests us here as the father and first master of the much greater artist David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690), who completed his artistic education under Rubens, without, however, abdicating his own personality. Indeed, those of his pictures which reflect the manner of Rubens too closely are of little account in the achievement of the younger Teniers, who only begins to be himself when he devotes his prolific brush to the social life of his contemporaries, and especially of the lower classes. His pictures constitute the most realistic and convincing record of the tastes, manners, and amusements of his time. His types are full of character, but without the exaggerations so often found in Brueghel and Brouwer. What he retained of Rubens, even in his Village Fêtes, Tavern Scenes, Dances, and Carousals is the application of the great master’s principles of light and harmonious colour. But apart from this, he rejected the “grand style” and the conscious search for beauty. The ugliness of his types and gestures led Louis xiv. to exclaim in front of his pictures, “Ôtez-moi ces magots-là!”
Few painters are as exhaustively represented at the Louvre as the younger Teniers. The Catalogue includes no fewer than thirty-nine entries under his name, two of which, in the La Caze collection (Nos. 2189 and 2190), are copies after pictures by Lotto and Titian respectively in the collection of the Archduke Leopold William, Governor of the Netherlands, to whom Teniers was appointed Court painter. It would serve no purpose here to enumerate the long list of Kermesse, Village Fête, and Alehouse Scenes in the French national collection. Among his most deservedly famous masterpieces is The Return of the Prodigal Son (No. 2156), which belongs to a series of which another scene is to be seen at the Dulwich Gallery. The subject is really only a thinly veiled excuse for the painting of a genre piece of the contemporary life of the better classes of his country. The scene of the feast is laid outside a country inn that figures in many of Teniers’s pictures. Fully signed, and dated 1644, the picture belongs to the beginning of Teniers’s very best period. In The Temptation of St. Anthony (No. 2158) he rivals Bosch in the invention of grotesquely fantastic monsters. Among other important works by the master in the Louvre must be mentioned The Denial of St. Peter (No. 2155), a painting of exquisite silvery quality, signed and dated
DAVID TENIERS, f. AN. 1646;
The Works of Mercy (No. 2157); the Village Fête (No. 2159); and the Peasants dancing by an Inn Door (No. 2161), which was stolen from the collection in 1815 and returned in the following year with a letter explaining that it had been removed by a Frenchman who feared that it might fall into the hands of the Allied Forces.
By Teniers’s pupil, François Duchatel (1616?–1694?) is the excellent Portrait of a Gentleman (No. 1960). Duchatel is a very rare master, whose style in portraiture so closely resembles that of Gonzales Coques that his pictures have been at times ascribed to that painter. Jacob van Artois (1613–1684?), the painter of the Landscape (No. 1901) in the La Caze room, was one of the leading Flemish landscape painters of his time, and frequently collaborated with Teniers, who added the figures to some of his landscapes. He was the master of Cornelis Huysmans (1648–1727), who frequently assisted the battle painter, Van der Meulen, and is here represented by eight pictures (Nos. 2002–2009). Among the landscape painters of that period must also be mentioned Jan Siberechts (1627–1703), who spent the closing years of his life in England, but does not seem to have had much influence on the evolution of the English landscape school. By him is the Rustic Scene (No. 2140a).