Flemish Interior

David Teniers the Younger was one of the most productive painters of 17th-century Flanders, and this is his everyday subject: the inside of a Flemish tavern or farmhouse, with ordinary people among barrels, jugs, and kitchen clutter. He turned out scenes like this by the hundred for a growing market of middle-class buyers who wanted cheerful, closely observed pictures of country life to hang at home. What makes his career unusual is the company he also kept. Teniers became court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and looked after the archduke's huge collection of Italian paintings in Brussels. So the same hand that catalogued Titians and Veroneses for a Habsburg prince also lingered, all his life, over smoky rooms full of peasants drinking and smoking by a low fire.