Penitent St. Peter

David Teniers is remembered mostly for noisy scenes, peasant weddings and smoky taverns full of drink and cards. This is a quieter subject. Saint Peter kneels in a bare, rocky place and weeps, an old man doing penance for the night he denied knowing Christ three times before the cock crowed. The tearful, repentant Peter was a favourite image of Counter-Reformation Europe, where confession and penance had moved to the centre of Catholic life, and Flanders in the 1650s was firmly in that world. Teniers had another life besides his own painting. In Brussels he served as court painter and keeper of the huge picture collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and he spent years making small copies of its Italian masters, later gathered into the first illustrated catalogue ever made of a gallery. A devotional half-length like this one shows the hand that had studied all those southern paintings up close.