Villagers outside a tavern

Small-scale landscapes like this village scene beside a stream proved remarkably popular in Teniers’s time and subsequent centuries. The delicate colouring and subtle perception of nature evident in these works lends them a distinctive charm, one that especially ingratiated them to French collectors in the eighteenth century. Depending on the time of day depicted, they were given names like ‘Après-Midi’ and ‘Après-Dîner’. In his Galerie des Peintres Flamands, Hollandais, et Allemands (Paris and Amsterdam, 1792-96), the painter, collector and dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun famously described the charm and magnetic appeal of such works:

‘Teniers’ “Afternoons” are well-known; they are little pictures with few figures that he usually did in the afternoon, in order to relax after the large compositions he worked on in the morning. He intended them for his friends, whom he could not satisfy otherwise’ (quoted in M. Klinge, David Teniers the Younger: Paintings, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 1991, p. 216, under no. 74).