David Teniers d.y.

Variant namesauktoriserad namnform: David Teniers d.y.

DatesBiographical dates: 1610 - 1690 Dead: dead 1690 Born: born 1610

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BiographyBiography: Landscape- and genre painter and etcher. Born in Antwerp, where he was reportedly a pupil of his father, the painter and art dealer David Teniers I. He was eceived as a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1632/1633, and served as Dean for the year 1645/1646. He was closely associated with many Antwerp painters, especially his father-in-law Jan Brueghel I. On 22 June 1637 he married Anna Brueghel, with Peter Paul Rubens serving as a witness, Meerminne”, in the Lange Nieuwstraat. During the 1640s Teniers prospered and was able to rent a manor house, “Drij Toren” (Three Towers) near Perck, between Mechelen and Vilvoorde, which he then purchased in 1662. Within a few months of the arrival in Brussels in 1647 of the newly appointed Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Teniers II was employed in his service; in 1651 he succeeded Jan van den Hoecke as court painter and director of the Archduke’s paintings collection. Teniers II served the Archduke’s successor, Don Juan of Austria (governor from 1656 to 1659), in the same capacity, and was honoured with the title ayuda de cámara by both princes. He also worked for Philip IV of Spain and Willem II of the Northern Netherlands. From 1650 to 1655 he was travelling in England, where he had been sent in 1651 to purchase paintings from the collection of King Charles I. With his second marriage in October 1656 to Isabella de Fren, daughter of Andries de Fren, secretary to the Council of Brabant, Teniers II initiated a long drawn out process to obtain a patent of nobility (which finally succeeded in 1680). Teniers was one of the founding members of the Académie royale in Antwerp, established in 1663, and he continued to date paintings at least as late as 1680. A specialist in low-life genre, peasant kermises and guardroom scenes, Teniers was a long-lived and remarkably prolific artist, who produced one of the largest oeuvres in the history of painting. Together with Adriaen Brouwer he was the most important 17th-century Flemish painter of low-life genre scenes. The greater part comprises scenes of peasant life inspired by Brouwer’s unapologetically naturalistic work of the 1630s, and greatly influenced by Dutch genre painters. He also painted history- and mythological subjects, allegories, low-life professions (alchemists and quack doctors), a few high-life subjects and views of collectors’ cabinets, and the staffage in numerous pictures by other artists. He did not paint many religious subjects, with one exception: scenes of witches and demons assaulting St. Anthony, in the tradition of Hieronymus Bosch. He also popularized singeries, the humorous genre tradition in which monkeys were substituted for humans. His landscapes owe a debt to Paul Bril and Joos de Momper. In his mature career he sometimes collaborated with Jan van Kessel and Jan Davidsz. de Heem. An inventive artist, Teniers II’s ideas were also widely disseminated through reproductive prints and served as designs for tapestries. His works were being copied in his own time, and many paintings by his imitators have frequently been misattributed to him.

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