This dynamic sheet is a study for the two central figures in the foreground of Teniers' major 1652 painting,
The Shooting of the Bird in Brussels, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
1 This large and elaborate painting records the crowds gathered in the square before the church of Nôtre Dame des Sablons, in Brussels, for the annual festival of the archers' guild, on 23 April 1651. That year the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Regent of the Southern Netherlands, was chosen to perform the ceremonial duty of shooting at a bird suspended from the spire of the church, which he duly hit with his arrow. The Archduke seems to have taken the painting with him when he returned to Vienna in 1656.
The two opulently dressed figures standing prominently in the foreground, for whom this is a study, have not been identified, but must have been specific local gentlemen. A sheet of studies for the boys climbing trees to get a better view of the events is in the collection of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris.2
1 Inv 756; David Teniers der Jüngere, exh. cat., Karlsruhe, Staatlichen Kunsthalle, 2005-6, pp. 174-7. no. 87
2 Inv. no. M 602; Ibid., pp. 262-3, no. 83