David Teniers the Younger (Antwerp, 1610 – Brussels, 1690), workshop of, Village Festival

David Teniers the Younger (Antwerp, 1610 – Brussels, 1690), workshop of 

Village festival

Oil on canvas, 73 x 107 cm

With frame, 88 x 123 cm

The painting examined here, a work from the workshop of David Teniers II, depicts a country celebration enlivened by a group of peasants dancing to the sound of bagpipes in front of a brick house, following a compositional scheme that the Flemish artist reproduced countless times throughout his long career. The scene, set in a courtyard enclosed by a high wooden fence, is populated with figures characteristic of Teniers's repertoire: the dancing couple at the center of the composition, the children playing undisturbed among the adults, the figure of the drinker leaning against the fence on the right, and in the background a grove that encloses the view with soft masses of trees, under a sky animated by bright white clouds. This figurative system finds a precise term of comparison in the autograph work preserved at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where the same typical characters appear, almost repeated like fixed formulas within the artist's production: the wind player sitting on a barrel, the young lovers, the naughty children and the tipsy figure reclining against the fence. This is not an isolated case: Teniers returned with extraordinary frequency to the theme of the village festival, as demonstrated by the version now held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, in which, similarly to our painting, a sleeping youth leans against a barrel in the left foreground, and the versions held at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Apsley House in London, which confirm how central this subject was to the artist's production and how his workshop multiplied its variations to satisfy a very lively market demand. Moreover, the success of these themes has its roots in the aesthetics of Jan Brueghel the Elder, from whom Teniers borrowed not only the compositional schemes but also the idyllic and good-natured vision of peasant life, so dear to seventeenth-century Flemish culture and widely celebrated in literature. Son of David Teniers the Elder and trained in his father's workshop, where he assimilated the teachings of Adam Elsheimer and the innovations of Rubens, David II married the daughter of Jan Brueghel des Vellutes in 1637, thus becoming related to one of the most illustrious dynasties of Flemish painting. His production, initially indebted to Frans Francken II and then to Adriaen Brouwer, concentrated above all on genre painting: tavern scenes, village festivals, interiors of witchcraft and alchemists, picture galleries, a vast repertoire that guaranteed him enormous success at the European courts. Appointed court painter and director of the collections of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in Brussels in 1651, Teniers curated a collection that would later become the founding nucleus of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The enormous demand for these rural compositions explains the active role of the workshop in replicating and varying the models invented by the master, of which the present painting constitutes a coherent testimony, faithful to the original spirit.

The object is in good condition

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