Portrait of the Artist's Wife Anna Brueghel Playing the Lute and Their Son David Blowing Soap Bubbles

In 1644 and 1645 David Teniers was dean of the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, the head of the city's painters, at about 34. The museum dates this small panel to those same years, and in it he paints his own household. The woman playing the lute is his wife, Anna Brueghel, a daughter of the painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, and the boy beside her is their son David, then about six, blowing soap bubbles.

For viewers in the Netherlands of that time, a child with bubbles usually carried a meaning. It recalled the Latin saying homo bulla, man is a bubble, a reminder of how short life is, and music could carry the same thought, since a note fades as soon as it sounds. The museum's catalogue lists the picture simply as an interior with figures. It came to Turin with the Flemish and Dutch paintings of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Habsburg general, which began to arrive from Vienna in 1741.