David Teniers the Younger

Believed to have been acquired by the grandfather of the present owners during the early part of the 20th century.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external expert and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a perfectly flat oak panel, bevelled on all sides. There has clearly never been any structural problem with this carefully selected panel, which has remained beautifully stable and secure. It appears to have had a calm past history with comparatively few interventions. One possibly early cleaning did leave some wear in the vulnerable browns of the scene on the right, in the floor and the brown boots of one of the boors carousing around the fire. However this seems never to have been retouched, and the painting has been spared further wear, with much beautifully intact crisp brushwork elsewhere almost throughout. The lovely still life on the left and at upper left is remarkably pure and complete down to the finest detail of the ears of corn, the mussel shells, shoe, the cheese, and much else in all their texture and finish. Even the little drawing pinned to the wall is in fine condition. There are a few minor little fairly recent retouchings : over a rubbed place at the edge on the left, little touches in the left base corner, in the foreground near the right base corner, one tiny touch in the background near the head of the maid, and others near her foot, but these are minimal in an unusually finely preserved painting. His report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This well-preserved example of Teniers' genre scenes was painted in when the artist was at the height of his powers in the mid-1640s. A peasant woman, clad in blue, is awoken momentarily from her vegetable peeling duties by a disturbance out of view to the left. Beyond, four men gather round a roaring fire drinking, three of them listening to the drunken slur of the boor slumped on an overturned wooden crate.

The idea of constructing the composition along two planes, with the predominant frontal plane filling the left half or two thirds of the picture, was one that Teniers found suited his many barn, tavern and kitchen interiors, and there are many examples of such works from the 1640s in which he employed it. Three of his best known works, painted within a year or two of the present example, are built along such lines; the Card Players sold in these Rooms, 9 July 2008, lot 34, Le Bonnet blanc dated 1644, in a private collection,¹ and Card Players in an inn, dated 1645, in the Louvre.² Another work of this compositional type from 1644 (The Hague, Mauritshuis), showing a rather grander kitchen to the one depicted here, shows a maid in almost precisely the same pose.³

1.  Private collection. Signed and dated 1644, oil on panel, 49 by 68 cm.; see M. Klinge, David Teniers the Younger, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp 1991, p. 33, no. 114, reproduced in colour p. 115. 
2.  Paris, Musée du Louvre.  Signed and dated 1645, oil on canvas, 56 by 78 cm.; see Klinge, op. cit., p. 116, under no. 34, reproduced
3.  Ibid., p. p. 120, no. 36, reproduced in colour p. 121.