Lot 1069 Dα

Red varnish collection label with a crowned coat-of-arms to the back of the stretcher.

David Teniers was among the most successful and productive painters of his era in the Southern Netherlands. His œuvre encompasses a surprisingly varied selection of motifs, from religious narratives, to portraits, to still lifes and landscapes. However, he remains most well-known for his diverse genre scenes of rural and city life, and it is these that have established him as the epitome of Netherlandish genre painting.
The present work depicts a busy harbour scene flanked on the left by a mighty fortress and a broad stretch of coastline on the right. Several fishermen and their customers have gathered on the pier to buy and sell the day's catch. Fishing boats, shown moored in the harbour, bringing in their nets or heading out on to the open sea enliven the view over the water.
Dr. Margret Klinge dates the present work to the artist's later phase in the 1660s. Teniers was born in Antwerp in 1610 to the painter David Teniers the Elder. He married a daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and Peter Paul Rubens was best man at their wedding. Teniers became court painter to the Spanish Governor Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in 1651, moving from Antwerp to the residential city of Brussels, where the present work is thought to have been painted.