David Teniers the Younger

Collection Monsieur Duval, Geneva;

His sale, M^e Phillips, London, 12-13 May 1846, lot 48;

Private Collection, France;

Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, Monaco, 21 June 1986, lot 140.

David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) was the son of the painter David Teniers the Elder. Following in his father’s footsteps, he was also influenced by Adrian Brouwer’s genre scenes. He became one of the principal exponents of Flemish genre painting in his period, describing the daily life of his contemporaries, with an approach that was both realistic and ironic.

A member of the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp and founder of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in that city, he married Anne Brueghel, daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder. He was he was a court painter and chamberlain to Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm of Habsburg in Brussels and in the seventeenth century he was one of the leading figures of Flemish artistic life, his reputation travelling far and wide.

With The Flock at Rest, Teniers returns to daily rural life in contemporary Flanders. The composition was already known from an engraving by Ignaz Sebastian Klauber, mentioning that the painting was in the Cabinet of Mr. Duval in 1812. The scene is set in rolling countryside with several buildings, including an unidentified castle in the upper right and buildings hidden in the vegetation on the left and close to the line of the horizon. Cowherds, swineherds and shepherds are grazing their flocks in the foreground, accompanied by their dogs. In the lower right corner, Teniers has created a small still life with a bag, some carrots in a wooden tub, a copper cooking pot and a jug.

As in Peasants at Archery (circa 1645, London, The National Gallery, inv. NG5851), it is possible to see the influence of Adriaen Brouwer, an artist of the previous generation, who also painted peasant scenes. Teniers’s treatment is however more refined and less brutal, representing not just a simple landscape but the relationship between the peasants and with their flocks.