In the 17th century alone no fewer than eight members of the Antwerp Teniers family were professional painters. David Teniers the Younger was born in 1610, the oldest son of the painter of the same name. Although he studied with his father for many years, he was not particularly influenced by the older man’s style. A close observer and student of contemporary painting trends in Antwerp, he chose to emulate not great contemporaries like Jacob Jordaens, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck, but the Bruegel family, whose compositions preserved the tradition of genre painting established in the 16th century. He also took inspiration from the works of Frans Francken II, Joos de Momper, and the group of Rotterdam artists around Cornelis van Haarlem and Herman Saftleven. Also of major importance for his early work were the paintings of Adriaen Brouwer.

In 1637, having been inducted into Antwerp’s guild of Saint Luke as a master five years before, Teniers married a daughter of Jan Bruegel the Elder. Her guardian, Rubens, served as a witness at the wedding. The marriage brought the young painter prosperity and respect. In the next two decades Teniers explored the broad range of genre and landscape subject matter that would become the signature of his entire output. He mainly painted everyday scenes of peasant life, often with a moralistic undertone, as well as allegories, still lifes, religious paintings, satirical scenes featuring monkeys, and portraits. In the year he was married, he painted his first peasant wedding, and after 1640 there followed a number of multifigured scenes of parish fairs. After the 1640s he devoted increasing attention to landscapes.

From 1645 to 1646 Teniers served as dean of the Saint Luke guild, and in 1647 he worked for the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. Appointed court painter in 1651, Teniers moved from Antwerp to Brussels, where his tasks included overseeing and expanding the archduke’s collection of paintings, producing gallery pictures that documented the scope of the collection, and also preparing an illustrated catalogue of the works. For the catalogue Teniers produced miniature painted copies to serve as patterns for the engravers. The project was interrupted by the archduke’s resignation and return to Vienna in 1656. The work was finally published, on Teniers’s initiative, in 1660. With 244 engravings illustrating the archduke’s most important Italian works, the Theatrum Pictorium was the first printed and illustrated catalogue of a painting collection. Leopold Wilhelm’s successor, Don Juan of Austria, confirmed the artist’s position at court. Among Teniers’s other patrons, in addition to the bourgeoisie, were numerous European aristocrats, among them William II, prince of Orange, Christina, queen of Sweden, and Louis II de Bourbon, prince of Condé.

Teniers’s genrelike depictions of country life and his vast stock of motifs continued to be studied well into the 18th century, and had a major influence on painting in Flanders and France.

Karl Schütz