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Lot Essay
In the course of his long career, Teniers and his workshop embraced a remarkable range of themes and genres. In his early period, the master was concerned ‘mainly with an allegorical and emblematic conception of painting with moralizing overtones’ (M. Klinge, David Teniers the Younger. Paintings, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Ghent, 1991, p. 19). This picture can be associated with the small group of works depicting satirical monkey scenes, such as A Festival of Monkeys, dated 1633 (Private collection; Christie's, London, 7 December 2017, lot 19) and Guardroom with Monkeys (Christie’s, New York, 19 April 2007, lot 23), both of which were included in Teniers’ innovative self-portrait, Artist in his Studio (1635; Private collection), in which he shows himself in a gallery interior surrounded by his own pictures. The master seems in fact to have associated himself and his profession with simian pictures in a specific way, reflecting on the role of the artist as imitator, aping man and nature. Perhaps, to underline this connection, the present picture includes a print in the upper right, which may be a portrait of the master. Although other scholars have endorsed the attribution to Teniers, Margaret Klinge believes this painting to have been executed in the Teniers workshop, combining elements from two compositions, one of them being the painting from the Liechtenstein collection, Vaduz.
Monkeys carried symbolic weight in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They appeared in images as diverse as playing cards, Dürer prints and paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. They were associated primarily with sinfulness and folly, used in the visual arts to parody and satirise humanity, connotations that would doubtless not have been lost on Teniers’s educated humanist audience. In Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, for example, a satirical allegory published in 1494, Dame Folly leads monkeys and fools by a rope and ‘apes or fools in high places’ are associated with the pride of the powerful in his chapter on the presumption of the proud. Bruegel the Elder’s Two Monkeys (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) of 1562 has been interpreted as a depiction of two specific sins, avarice and prodigality, while more sinister meaning was given by Luther, who believed they were devils, and Calvin, who described them as apostles of the Antichrist.
Monkeys carried symbolic weight in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They appeared in images as diverse as playing cards, Dürer prints and paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. They were associated primarily with sinfulness and folly, used in the visual arts to parody and satirise humanity, connotations that would doubtless not have been lost on Teniers’s educated humanist audience. In Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, for example, a satirical allegory published in 1494, Dame Folly leads monkeys and fools by a rope and ‘apes or fools in high places’ are associated with the pride of the powerful in his chapter on the presumption of the proud. Bruegel the Elder’s Two Monkeys (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) of 1562 has been interpreted as a depiction of two specific sins, avarice and prodigality, while more sinister meaning was given by Luther, who believed they were devils, and Calvin, who described them as apostles of the Antichrist.