TENIERS, DAVID. - Painter b. in Antwerp on 15 Dec. 1610, d. in Brussels on 25 Apr. 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 William, who appointed him court painter and administrator of the Archducal Art Gallery. The new governor Don John of Austria confirmed him in the same year as court painter. 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 linked himself to the genre of Frans Francken II, although he greatly surpassed him from the pictorial point of view; in his peasant pictures he turns toward the genre of Adriaen Brouwer, whose influence remains evident in him until ca. 1634. T. then develops a style of his own that is distinguished from that of his early model by a lighter tone of color, by a more luminous and warmer brushstroke, by a more pleasing composition of the picture.
After the age of 30 T. also includes landscape in his works, in painting which he develops a very fine and personal art. From the happy combination of scenes of peasants with landscape are born his most successful pictures. The years 1640-50 are the culminating moment of his art; after 1651 it declines; the landscape becomes more faded and the figures lose expression; the color pales and takes on gray and dull tones. T. has broadened the field of Brouwer's representations; alongside peasants and tavern types he also places bourgeois, workers, doctors, alchemists, magicians and witches surrounded by an atmosphere of phantoms. T. also treated religious subjects, e.g.: The Liberation of St. Peter from Prison, The Temptations of St. Anthony, mythological scenes (e.g.: 4 pictures of 1638 in Vienna formerly attributed to his father) and poetic themes (e.g.: 12 small pictures with the story of Rinaldo and Armida in Madrid, of small format).
Original are the pictures in which he replaces the figures of peasants with monkeys and cats. Sometimes he also paints historical events (the battle of Valenciennes in 1656, in Antwerp). T. is the greatest and the best genre painter of the 17th century and the pictures attributed to him number more than 2000.
Bibliography3 works
Emilia Durini