TENIERS, DAVID. — Painter, born in Antwerp on 15 December 1610, died in Brussels on 25 April 1690. A pupil of his father, he was recognized as a master in Antwerp in 1632–33.
In March 1651 he went to Brussels, summoned by the governor, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who appointed him court painter and administrator of the Archducal Art Gallery. The new governor, don Giovanni d’Austria, confirmed him as court painter in the same year. He founded an art academy in Antwerp, which was inaugurated in 1665.
T.’s works date from 1633 to 1680. In his early works he followed the genre of Frans Francken II, although he surpassed him considerably from a pictorial standpoint; in his peasant scenes he turned toward the manner of Adriano Brouwers, whose influence remained evident in him until about 1634. T. then developed a style of his own, distinguished from that of his original model by a lighter tonality, a more luminous and warmer brushstroke, and a more pleasing composition.
After the age of 30, T. also included landscape in his works, in painting which he developed a very refined and personal art. His most successful pictures arose from the felicitous combination of peasant scenes with landscape. The years 1640–50 were the culminating period of his art; after 1651 it declined: the landscape became more faded, the figures lost their expressiveness, and the color grew paler, taking on gray and opaque tones. T. broadened the field of Brouwer’s representations; alongside peasants and tavern types he also depicted bourgeois figures, workers, physicians, alchemists, magicians, and witches surrounded by an atmosphere of ghosts. T. also treated religious subjects, e.g.: The Liberation of St. Peter from Prison, The Temptations of St. Anthony; mythological scenes (e.g., four paintings from 1638 in Vienna, formerly attributed to his father); and poetic themes (e.g., 12 small pictures depicting the story of Rinaldo and Armida in Madrid, in small format).
The pictures in which he replaces the figures of peasants with monkeys and cats are original. He also sometimes painted historical events (the Battle of Valenciennes in 1656, in Antwerp). T. is the greatest and finest genre painter of the 17th century, and the pictures attributed to him number more than 2,000.