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Lot Essay
Country festivities such as peasant weddings, harvest thanksgivings, and kermesses, together with dances and feasts outside the village inn, are subjects that David Teniers painted more often than any other. In every phase of his sixty-year career he returned to this theme, constantly varying and reformulating it. There is no doubt that these joyful, multifigured pictures were very popular with collectors and admirers of his art.
Teniers's interest in landscape and in the events making up the calendar of life in the country started in the latter part of the 1630s. He depicted peasants undertaking their mundane, day-to-day tasks, but more often he showed them dancing and enjoying themselves with games. His first village wedding was painted in 1637 and displays his ability to observe even the most minute details. The present work illustrates his progression, as his earlier more stylized figures are here replaced by characters with individual traits. Although the spatial definition of these later landscapes seems haphazard and informal, Teniers carefully composed his rural scenes to simulate a depiction of everyday life which is, in fact, idealistic, even arcadian. Dr. Margaret Klinge notes that 'Teniers's Flemish landscapes are only naturalistic in appearance. In fact, they are composed of motifs which in the arcadian literary tradition represent the serenity of country life [...] a happy peasantry at one with the gentry under the radiant blue of a vast sky [...] The rural life he presents is happy and carefree - an arcadian idyll' (M. Klinge, David Teniers the Younger, Antwerp, 1991, pp. 20-22).
The subtle tonality of the present work, suffused with a soft light, and the slightly looser, more coarsely painted figures are characteristic of Teniers' work of the 1660s and '70s. The demand for his pictures during these decades was great and his ability to produce varied paintings of village life seemed almost limitless. The vertical format for the present painting is somewhat unusual in Teniers' oeuvre although, typically for the artist, the composition is constructed along a strong diagonal: our eye is led from the figures in the foreground on one side of the painting through to the village beyond, on the other side. Although Teniers often included moralizing references in his paintings, lasciviousness and sexual allusions play a very limited part in the present picture. The jolly festivities take place in the warm sunlight of a late afternoon and strong local colors - red, blue, and yellow, accentuated with gleaming white - are dotted throughout the villagers' clothes. A more subdued red is echoed in the kermesse flag that flies over the scene.
Teniers's interest in landscape and in the events making up the calendar of life in the country started in the latter part of the 1630s. He depicted peasants undertaking their mundane, day-to-day tasks, but more often he showed them dancing and enjoying themselves with games. His first village wedding was painted in 1637 and displays his ability to observe even the most minute details. The present work illustrates his progression, as his earlier more stylized figures are here replaced by characters with individual traits. Although the spatial definition of these later landscapes seems haphazard and informal, Teniers carefully composed his rural scenes to simulate a depiction of everyday life which is, in fact, idealistic, even arcadian. Dr. Margaret Klinge notes that 'Teniers's Flemish landscapes are only naturalistic in appearance. In fact, they are composed of motifs which in the arcadian literary tradition represent the serenity of country life [...] a happy peasantry at one with the gentry under the radiant blue of a vast sky [...] The rural life he presents is happy and carefree - an arcadian idyll' (M. Klinge, David Teniers the Younger, Antwerp, 1991, pp. 20-22).
The subtle tonality of the present work, suffused with a soft light, and the slightly looser, more coarsely painted figures are characteristic of Teniers' work of the 1660s and '70s. The demand for his pictures during these decades was great and his ability to produce varied paintings of village life seemed almost limitless. The vertical format for the present painting is somewhat unusual in Teniers' oeuvre although, typically for the artist, the composition is constructed along a strong diagonal: our eye is led from the figures in the foreground on one side of the painting through to the village beyond, on the other side. Although Teniers often included moralizing references in his paintings, lasciviousness and sexual allusions play a very limited part in the present picture. The jolly festivities take place in the warm sunlight of a late afternoon and strong local colors - red, blue, and yellow, accentuated with gleaming white - are dotted throughout the villagers' clothes. A more subdued red is echoed in the kermesse flag that flies over the scene.