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Lot Essay
In the 1560s, Pieter Bruegel the Elder introduced peasants' dances and weddings into Netherlandish art and from then onwards they remained a highly characteristic subject in Flemish genre painting. A worthy continuator and innovator of the rich tradition, Teniers made a specialty of them, often showing peasant weddings, kermesses and dancing and feasting peasants in front of taverns. Whereas Adriaen Brouwer, and occasionally Rubens, focussed on the excesses of peasant life, portraying base desires, Teniers advocated a more positive image of his rustic protagonists. In the present village feast, as in his numerous other interpretations of the subject, a merry, harmonious atmosphere prevails.
This village feast is a late work, painted around 1680 as suggested by the dress of the fashionable violinist in the right middle zone. The colourful scene takes place at Castle Drij Toren, the artist's proud and lordly possession, which here serves as a backdrop in the right background. Teniers had bought the estate in 1662/63 from Jan van Brouchoven, the second husband of Rubens's second wife, Hélène Fourment. Drij Toren was situated in the small village of Perk halfway between Brussels and Mechelen, not far from Rubens's castle Het Steen in Elewijt. Today, only an entrance gate is preserved of the complex of buildings.
Looking at the multitude of drinking, eating and dancing peasants the artist's utter joy in painting this beloved subject is apparent. A born storyteller with a keen eye for detail and thorough psychological understanding, Teniers's scene vibrates with emotion and human interaction. Wonderful details are the still life of earthenware plates and bowls and a copper pot in the right foreground and the two magpies circling around the castle, strongly enhancing the suggestion of depth.
The French painter and printmaker Antoine Masson (1636-1700) made an etching of the present painting, which, although undated, must have been executed quite soon after completion, implying that it had ended up in a French collection almost immediately.
Much later, this lot surfaced in Paris with Baron de Beurnonville, whose collection was one of the most distinguished formed in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dispersed in sales between 1872 and 1906, it comprised more than 1,000 paintings, besides drawings and works of art. The emphasis was on Northern schools of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including for instance Rembrandt's Landscape with an Obelisk of 1638 (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), but French and Italian painting was represented by superior works as well, such as Drouais's Portrait of Madame de Pompadour (London, National Gallery) and Tiepolo's Triumph of Flora (San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum).
One other distinguished owner was the railway magnate Collis Potter Huntington, who also owned Vermeer's Woman tuning a lute (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and who was the uncle of Henry E. Huntington, who founded the well-known Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
This village feast is a late work, painted around 1680 as suggested by the dress of the fashionable violinist in the right middle zone. The colourful scene takes place at Castle Drij Toren, the artist's proud and lordly possession, which here serves as a backdrop in the right background. Teniers had bought the estate in 1662/63 from Jan van Brouchoven, the second husband of Rubens's second wife, Hélène Fourment. Drij Toren was situated in the small village of Perk halfway between Brussels and Mechelen, not far from Rubens's castle Het Steen in Elewijt. Today, only an entrance gate is preserved of the complex of buildings.
Looking at the multitude of drinking, eating and dancing peasants the artist's utter joy in painting this beloved subject is apparent. A born storyteller with a keen eye for detail and thorough psychological understanding, Teniers's scene vibrates with emotion and human interaction. Wonderful details are the still life of earthenware plates and bowls and a copper pot in the right foreground and the two magpies circling around the castle, strongly enhancing the suggestion of depth.
The French painter and printmaker Antoine Masson (1636-1700) made an etching of the present painting, which, although undated, must have been executed quite soon after completion, implying that it had ended up in a French collection almost immediately.
Much later, this lot surfaced in Paris with Baron de Beurnonville, whose collection was one of the most distinguished formed in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dispersed in sales between 1872 and 1906, it comprised more than 1,000 paintings, besides drawings and works of art. The emphasis was on Northern schools of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including for instance Rembrandt's Landscape with an Obelisk of 1638 (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), but French and Italian painting was represented by superior works as well, such as Drouais's Portrait of Madame de Pompadour (London, National Gallery) and Tiepolo's Triumph of Flora (San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum).
One other distinguished owner was the railway magnate Collis Potter Huntington, who also owned Vermeer's Woman tuning a lute (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and who was the uncle of Henry E. Huntington, who founded the well-known Huntington Library in San Marino, California.