David Teniers the Younger (Antwerp 1610-1690 Brussels)
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VA… Read more
David Teniers the Younger (Antwerp 1610-1690 Brussels)

Card players in an inn

Details
David Teniers the Younger (Antwerp 1610-1690 Brussels)
Card players in an inn
signed 'D.TENIERS F.' (lower right)
oil on panel
13½ x 16 3/8 in. (34.4 x 41.7 cm.)
Provenance
Acquired by Anton Philips in 1919, and recorded in 1928 as hanging on the staircase at De Laak.
Thence by descent.
Special notice
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis. From time to time, Christie's may offer a lot which it owns in whole or in part. This is such a lot.

Lot Essay

David Teniers II made several pictures of card players in the 1640s, thereby taking up a theme popularised by Adriaen Brouwer a decade earlier. These include Le Bonnet Blanc, dated 1644 (private collection, Germany), and Card Players in an Inn (private collection; see M. Klinge, catalogue of the exhibition, David Teniers the Younger, Antwerp, 1991, nos. 33 and 34), both of which - like the present work - are composed using a central, triangular grouping of the main figures, illuminated from a window upper left, with figures in the background on the right. Brouwer's Card Players (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich) seems to have been the source of this compositional formula. Margret Klinge has noted how in these works, Teniers moves away from Brouwer's vision of card players as ruffians consumed by greed, anger and recklessness, to show card playing as a simple, relaxing pleasure to be enjoyed after a day's work (op. cit., p. 114).

In this unpublished work, a bearded man has recently entered a tavern, his hat hanging on his chair and his vending basket at his side, to enjoy a game of cards where he is carefully observed coming to terms with defeat at the hands of a younger, sword-bearing man who is confidently revealing his aces to his opponent. The restrained palette, made up predominantly of browns and yellows, and the rapid, mottled rendering of the background recalls the artist's earlier style as seen, for example, in the Dice Players, datable to circa 1640, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (ibid., no. 20). A copy of the present work, on canvas, is recorded in the Grossmann collection, Lorrach, sold in Freiburg, 14-15 March 1951, lot 529).

More from Important Old Master & British Pictures Including works from the Collection of Anton Philips

View All
View All