KARLSRUHE, GERMANY.-The Staatliche Kunsthalle of Karlsruhe presents, for the first time in Germany, one of the great masters of genre painting of the Golden Century in Flanders, David Teniers the Younger. Based on the rich collections of the museum itself, which is one of the most important and oldest in the country, and thanks to exceptional loans from the greatest public and private collections in Europe and the USA, the exhibition presents 140 exceptional works, among them 90 paintings and drawings by Teniers of which a great number have never been shown in public before - as well as paintings by some of his most brilliant forerunners and contemporaries : Adriaen Brouwer (1605/1606-1638), Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638) and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Some thirty prints based on paintings, as well as three tapestries in the master’s style complete the exhibition.

Genre painter and Court painter - Born in Antwerp in 1610, Teniers did his apprenticeship with his father, David Teniers the Elder, before being named master of Saint Luke’s guild around 1632/1633. In 1637 he married Anna Brueghel, the daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder. The fiancée’s tutor, and witness of the wedding was none less than Peter Paul Rubens. Though he excelled in painting rural scenes, Teniers frequented high society: He was court painter and the curator of the collections of Archduke Leopold William, the governor of the Southern Netherlands. In 1651, he moved to Brussels where he acceded to high positions in the name of his protector, including the conservation of the Archduke’s important collections. In that capacity, he drew up the Theatrum pictorium in 1660, the first illustrated catalogue of prints of a collection of paintings. He participated actively in the creation of the Beaux-Arts Academy of Antwerp in 1664.

Real life painting - The exhibition in Karlsruhe sheds light on the various phases in the artist’s evolution and the diversity of his work, with works from the most brilliant period of Teniers’ immense production. The painter’s first steps were marked by the influence of Dutch genre painting with its moralizing connotations. With the help of a dark palette, Teniers painted the inside of inns, of cabarets and barns brimming over with life, full of exuberant peasants whose excessiveness and rustic manners he showed and ridiculed. He also sketched with mischievousness and skill patients’ painful encounters with healers and other teeth-pullers, as well as the heavy and disturbing atmosphere of alchemists’ laboratories.