Artist: David Teniers The Elder
Date: 1655
Size: 64 x 94 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of this signed work which has been dated by Klinge to the first half of the 1650s.8 The window panes were rendered using the sgraffito technique. The gathering in this rustic scene is unusually enigmatic and its intended meaning remains unclear. The Braamcamp catalogue describes the man as a gardener who had brought the peasant woman vegetables. The 1976 collection catalogue described the pair as a peasant and his wife and child. For Klinge the scene depicted a prosperous farmer and his family. Certainly the protagonists have a refined air despite the humble setting, and the child wears a valhoed,9 typical protective headgear worn by the children of well-to-do families; the same model for the mother appears in the foreground of the State Hermitage Museum Peasant Wedding of 1650.10 The possibility arises that she was intended as a wet nurse. Klinge correctly viewed the scene as one of ‘rural fecundity and abundance’; her claim that it ‘stressed the positive strength of the peasantry on whom hope for the economic welfare of the people must depend’,11 is perhaps overambitious. The nostalgic tone of Virgil’s Georgics could perhaps be better associated with it, especially the passage in which the life of the ‘happy husbandman’ is extolled: ‘O happy husbandman! Too happy, should they come to know their blessings! For whom, far from the clash of arms, most righteous Earth, unbidden, pours forth from her soil an easy sustenance … Theirs is repose without care, and a life that knows no fraud but is rich in treasures manifold … Among them, as she quitted the earth, Justice planted her latest steps.’12 The arrangement of household goods and vegetables stems from Teniers’s earliest activity.13 The vegetables are all autumnal root crops. The object hanging from the fence post is a portable cage to house a decoy owl. Klinge believed that the spade was an attribute of Hope; but it is better regarded as an attribute of Labour.14 Gregory Martin, 2022
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