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).