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Lot Essay
In 1647 David Teniers II entered the service of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, second son of Emperor Ferdinand II and governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1646 until his resignation a decade later. Four years later Teniers was named Leopold Wilhelm's court painter, necessitating the artist's move from Antwerp to Brussels. Among Teniers’s tasks at court was the expansion of the archducal collection, which in the course of ten years became one of the most important in Europe (M. Klinge, David Teniers the Younger: Paintings, Drawings, Ghent, 1991, p. 21).
This painting is a copy, with changes, by Teniers of one of seven paintings by Domenico Fetti that was delivered from the collection of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham at York House to Antwerp in 1649 (E. A. Safarik, op. cit., p. 128). Nearly identical in size to Fetti’s original (fig. 1; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), Teniers has faithfully reproduced the earlier work but added three figures—the two standing boys dressed in blue, perhaps portraits of two of Teniers’s seven children, and the man wearing a blue cap at right—and curiously substituted the dog at lower left in Fetti’s painting for a wheelbarrow. The subject recounts the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) in which Jesus says that any laborer who worked in the vineyard, an allusion to the Kingdom of Heaven, would receive the same pay regardless of when during the day he accepted the invitation. The painting would seem to depict the moment at which those who had begun work in the morning complained about being paid the same as those who started later, with the vineyard's owner memorably responding that ‘the last will be first, and the first will be last’.
Around the time Teniers executed this painting he was at work on the Theatrum Pictorium, an illustrated catalogue—the first of its type—featuring 243 prints after Italian paintings in the Archduke’s collection that was published in 1660 at Teniers’s own expense. In preparation for this venture, Teniers produced small, painted modellos for his engravers to follow. The present painting does not appear to belong to this series, as the format is too large and the composition is not reproduced in the publication.
The present painting was formerly in the collection of King Louis-Philippe of France, where it was thought to depict ‘Le jardinier et son seigneur’, a fable by Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695) published in his multivolume Fables de la Fontaine (1668-1694). Following its sale from the King’s collection in 1851, the painting entered that of Thomas Jefferson Bryan, one of the first serious collectors of old master paintings in America. Bryan opened the Gallery of Christian Art in New York City in 1852 and subsequently donated his collection to the New York Historical Society in 1867.
This painting is a copy, with changes, by Teniers of one of seven paintings by Domenico Fetti that was delivered from the collection of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham at York House to Antwerp in 1649 (E. A. Safarik, op. cit., p. 128). Nearly identical in size to Fetti’s original (fig. 1; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), Teniers has faithfully reproduced the earlier work but added three figures—the two standing boys dressed in blue, perhaps portraits of two of Teniers’s seven children, and the man wearing a blue cap at right—and curiously substituted the dog at lower left in Fetti’s painting for a wheelbarrow. The subject recounts the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) in which Jesus says that any laborer who worked in the vineyard, an allusion to the Kingdom of Heaven, would receive the same pay regardless of when during the day he accepted the invitation. The painting would seem to depict the moment at which those who had begun work in the morning complained about being paid the same as those who started later, with the vineyard's owner memorably responding that ‘the last will be first, and the first will be last’.
Around the time Teniers executed this painting he was at work on the Theatrum Pictorium, an illustrated catalogue—the first of its type—featuring 243 prints after Italian paintings in the Archduke’s collection that was published in 1660 at Teniers’s own expense. In preparation for this venture, Teniers produced small, painted modellos for his engravers to follow. The present painting does not appear to belong to this series, as the format is too large and the composition is not reproduced in the publication.
The present painting was formerly in the collection of King Louis-Philippe of France, where it was thought to depict ‘Le jardinier et son seigneur’, a fable by Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695) published in his multivolume Fables de la Fontaine (1668-1694). Following its sale from the King’s collection in 1851, the painting entered that of Thomas Jefferson Bryan, one of the first serious collectors of old master paintings in America. Bryan opened the Gallery of Christian Art in New York City in 1852 and subsequently donated his collection to the New York Historical Society in 1867.