The Seven Works of Mercy

In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ names the kindnesses by which the righteous will be known at the Last Judgement: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, taking in strangers, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and visiting prisoners. That makes six. Medieval theologians added a seventh, burying the dead, and Teniers puts that one at the back on the right. The other six he sets in the street of a Flemish village, among ordinary people. The woman nursing a child is an old figure borrowed from allegory, where a mother with infants stood for Charity. Teniers came back to this subject at least six times, and a very similar version signed and dated 1644 is what places this copper in the 1640s. In 1742 Louis XV bought it from the heirs of the prince of Carignan, a Savoyard nobleman who had collected pictures in Paris. Five years later the engraver Jacques-Philippe Le Bas published a print after it, and the print is what made the painting famous in 18th-century France.