The Musette Player

This small canvas, under 30 centimetres high, once belonged to the official who spent years preparing the Louvre to become a museum. Charles-Claude de Flahaut, comte d'Angiviller, ran the royal buildings for Louis XVI from 1774. He planned to turn the Grande Galerie into a public picture gallery and bought Flemish and Dutch paintings to fill the gaps in the king's collection, and he collected for himself as well. When the Revolution came he fled abroad. As the property of an émigré, this Teniers was seized from his house and taken in 1794 to the dépôt de Nesle, a Paris storehouse for confiscated art, and in the same year it entered the new Muséum in the Louvre. The picture is an early one, painted in Antwerp in the mid-1630s, when Teniers was still in his twenties. An old man in a blue jacket plays the musette, a small bagpipe, while drinkers sit at a table behind him. Teniers left his initials, D.T., on the edge of that table.