David II Teniers

    I thought I'd mention another discovery from the Flemish School section of the Louvre: David II Teniers, a painter working in Antwerp in the mid 1600s. This is one of his paintings: 'Interieur de cabaret'.
    There is a protestant disavowel of the decorative here, but also I love the ordinariness of the scene; the glimpse into a commonplace life, the action that happens off to the side and the affection between the man and the woman seated in the foreground as he shows off the beauty of light reflected off a glass. Glass was available only to the richest people; every other vessel in the room, and Teniers has made sure they are obvious, are pewter, earthenware or wooden. This is a picture about class, or rather, social mobility.

    What you must remember was that I had just spent the best part of an hour with the most brilliant portraits of the rich and powerful that had been produced in Northern Europe at this time, and this painting punctured that pomposity, that of people who commissioned art at that time. In fact all the paintings in this little alcove gallery, off the main drag, did the same thing. They showed that normal people were equally good subjects for artistic work.
   Perhaps it begins to show the change from commissioned art to art of the artist's own volition. I don't know, it may have been commissioned too, possibly by the merchant pictured.
   But, a little googling has made it apparent that this is not the work that Teniers is renowned for, but instead the usual mix of historical and religious allegories. He was incredibly well known and respected in his time.
    I find it fascinating though, that he would have been knighted, like Reubens and Van Dyke, should he have agreed to give up selling his paintings, but he refused to do that, even though he wanted the social elevation. There is also another legend, that he created a rumour that he had died in order to sell his archived work for a higher price.
    This painting demonstrates an understanding of human emotion, humour, the ability to tell a story and, of course, technical skill. His business acumen, maybe financial greed, enabled him, at the end of the day, to value cold hard cash more than intangible social standing.