A Castle and its Proprietors

The Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger (1610-90) was the most famous seventeenth century painter of peasant life, however during the century’s middle decades he painted many country houses and castles, in response to the art market at this time. While some of his paintings depicted actual buildings, others – such as the castle here – are not identifiable. Placed centrally, the castle is illuminated by the sunlight breaking through the cloudy sky that fills the top half of the composition. In the right-hand foreground, it is perhaps the castle’s proprietors who have stopped to survey their domain, pausing to speak with a labourer. Seemingly discussing plans, the older estate worker points his finger towards the landscape in which two labourers on the castle slopes are already at work. The proprietor’s wife looks watchfully as her husband speaks and a young boy in blue, likely the son and estate heir, glances back and outwards towards the viewer, drawing them into the narrative. Part of Teniers’s prolific practice was populating other painters’ pictures with figures (known as staffage). The figures in this scene are likely taken from Teniers’s stock poses, as found in his numerous drawings. Teniers’s monogram can be found etched into the rock in the centre of the painting.  

Teniers’s own aspirations to nobility and success were marked by the acquisition in 1662 of a country house and estate called Drij Toren (which translates from Dutch as, ‘Three Towers’) and he achieved noble status in 1663. He was the eldest son of the painter David Teniers the Elder (1582-1649), and son-in-law of the Flemish artist Jan Breughel the Elder (1568-1625). In Antwerp he was appointed a dean of the Guild of Saint Luke – the organisation to which painters belonged – for the year 1645-46 and later moved to Brussels in 1651 on his appointment as court painter to the new Spanish governor Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1662). He continued as valet to the next archduke, John Joseph of Austria (1629-79), from 1655, and was keeper of his collection of paintings.