17th CENTURY TAVERN

Tavern Scene

17th -CENTURY TAVERN

By Joan K. Yanni

Genre painting during the Renaissance? Hard to imagine, but genre painting, which presents scenes of everyday activities, from work to celebrations to recreation, originated in ancient times.  Scenes of daily life can be found on the walls of Egyptian tombs. Excavated houses in Herculaneum and Pompeii are decorated with genre scenes--some of them erotic and even scatological. In the late Middle Ages, genre paintings were used in calendars, with illuminated manuscripts showing people engaged in activities of each season. And in the early Renaissance, painters often used contemporary people and places as backgrounds in their religious paintings.

Genre painting matured and reached a peak in Europe in the late 16^th and early 17^th century in Flanders with the work of Jan Brueghel, Adriaen Brouwer, and David Teniers the Younger. Subsequently, artists in 17^th-century Netherlands became the most familiar genre painters, recording every aspect of Dutch life in their works. Even the leading Dutch masters Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer created genre pictures of unrivaled skill and beauty.  MAG’S Tavern Scene (55.70), by Teniers, is an amusing scene of uninhibited rustics enjoying themselves in a tavern.

David Teniers the Younger, whose father was also a painter, was born in 1610 in Antwerp to a family of artists. Teniers’ father was his first and principal painting teacher, but though the father had never been very successful, his son became known all over Europe.

The art of the time revolved around Peter Paul Rubens, the “grand master” of his age, who painted voluminously in the Baroque style and kept a host of painters busy in his studio so that he could keep up with the demand for his work. Painters excellent in their own right participated in his division of labor. Frans Snyders, Anthony Van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Cornelis de Vos and others worked in their specialized fields on a painting after Rubens created the central theme.

Teniers never worked for Rubens, but he was intimately connected with him. When Teniers married the daughter of Brueghel, Rubens, who was her godfather, was his witness.  And it was through Rubens’ intercession that Teniers became a member of St. Luke’s, the painters’ guild, and later its dean.  Marriage to Brueghel’s daughter was a successful financial as well as artistic coup, because it carried with it a hefty dowry and brought Teniers into the circle of important painters of the time. In the year he was married, he painted his first peasant wedding, and later painted a series of multifigured scenes of parish fairs.

In 1651 Archduke Leopold William, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, made Teniers court painter, tapestry designer, and director of the picture gallery installed in his palace in Brussels. Teniers moved to Brussels, but he never lost interest in activities in Antwerp, and was instrumental in founding an academy of art there in 1663.

A prolific artist--he painted over 2000 works--Teniers had a huge following. He painted everything his clients asked for: portraits, landscapes, religious scenes, still lifes, animals, and  allegorical subjects as well as genre scenes.  Of special importance are his Art Gallery of Leopold Wilhelm pictures (he painted more than one) which document the famous works in the Archduke’s collection. He painted precise copies of almost 250 works in these holdings for use an in illustrated catalogue, which was the first printed and illustrated catalogue of a painting collection. Today the work not only testifies to the taste of the time but also helps trace the whereabouts of some “lost” masterpieces.         

.

Teniers’ rustic genre scenes, though realistic, elicit understanding rather than condemnation of the peasants, and they often present moralistic undertones. His pictures can be identified by their precise detail, for the trick of adding heads of onlookers and animals poking through windows to view the scene inside, and for the silvery brown light in the paintings. 

In MAG’s painting six men are relaxing, carousing, gossiping, and otherwise enjoying the freedom of the tavern. A black-and-white dog is enjoying the evening with them and waiting for scraps. A seventh man and another dog (or is it a cat?) look on through windows at the back of the painting. The men smoke clay pipes and drink tankards of ale or beer. (Smoking was thought to be inebriating at the time.)  One uninhibited  (and possibly intoxicated) fellow relieves himself in a wooden tub. The coarse-featured men are dressed in the rough clothing worn by country folk, with their garments shades of the same brown hues as their surroundings. The only color is provided by the smoker in the foreground, dressed in blue with a red cap and lighting his pipe.

Teniers’ comment on these activities is in full view on a paper tacked to the tavern wall: a picture of an owl and a candle.  There are various interpretations of the picture: if the owl is a symbol of wisdom, as it is in modern times, the picture refers to the Dutch proverb “When drink enters man his wisdom dims like the flame of a candle.” But an iconographic reference guide of the time identifies the owl as an attribute of vulgar, common persons, and another proverb states, “He’s as drunk as an owl.” Owls also signify folly, referred to by the candle and spectacles next to the bird:  “What use candle and spectacles if the owl cannot and will not see?”  The earthiness of the scene attests to the coarseness of life at many inns as well as to the importance of alcohol and tobacco at the time.

Our Tavern Scene is unusual in that it is one of the few pictures painted in Teniers’ late years that are dated. Painted  when Teniers was 70, it still shows his mastery of   his art. Teniers lived a long, productive life, dying in 1690 in his 80th year. His work continued to be popular after his death into the 18^th century, where it sometimes brought higher prices than that of Rembrandt at auctions.

Source: Susan Dodge-Peters, editor, Memorial Art Gallery, An Introduction to the Collection; Herwig Guratzsch: Dutch and Flemish Painting; Encarta Encyclopedia; curatorial files