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Private Life in the Art of Western Europe The exhibition takes place within the context of a major program entitled The Hermitage in Siberia and was prepared by the State Hermitage together with the Bazovy Element company, which is the co-organizer and general sponsor of the program. The exhibition consists of two sections and presents more than 130 works of painting, decorative and applied art created by West European masters of the 17th - 18th centuries. The artists of Flanders and Holland were the first in Europe to fully appreciate the possibilities provided by everyday life of their contemporaries for artistic subject, whether uncomplicated family scenes, gatherings in taverns, visits to the church, peasant holidays, or the daily life of cityfolk. Thirteen canvases by one of the greatest masters of genre painting, the outstanding 17th century Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) and 12 works by his contemporaries constitute the core of this exhibition on Private Life in the Art of Western Europe. D. Tenier's legacy consists of several hundred works. More than 40 paintings, basically genre works dating from the period of the flowering of his creativity (1640-1650), are kept in the State Hermitage. The canvases displayed in Ulan-Ude demonstrate the basic contours of Teniers' art and enable the visitor to appreciate the multifaceted nature of his talent as well as the specific aspects of his style. Tenier's distinctive credo appears in his work The Artist in his Atelier, in which he moves away from the majority of his contemporaries with their often idealized personages (see Balthazar Van den Bosche's Atelier of the Sculptor and Atelier of the Painter) and creates instead an image of the painter striving to be himself and painting nature the way he sees it in reality. In his many ‘peasant festivals' Teniers recorded how the representatives of different strata of society looked: see his Village Festival and Peasant Wedding. His canvas Reaping is an example of another variety of genre painting - the ‘seasons of the year'. In matched paintings of the pastoral genre entitled Shepherd and Shepherdess, the master presented children who looked more like small actors dressed up in theatrical costumes. Often the outer simplicity of the subject conceals an allegorical sense. Thus the painting of Monkeys in the Kitchen in which the little animals are distinguished by their different costumes and places is a parody of the social hierarchy in human society. Teniers often portrayed monkeys to poke fun at the activities of men. We can see the multifaceted creativity of the artist in two paintings by Frans Francken II on subjects which also figure in Teniers: The Witches' Kitchen and The Seven Acts of Mercy. D. Teniers frequently drew figures in architectural settings of the Dutch and Flemish masters. One example of this type of work is the Interior of the Antwerp Cathedral, which he painted together with Peeter Neeffs the Younger. David Teniers had close creative contacts with David Rejckart III (see Peasant with a Cat and Peasant with a Dog) and with Jos Van Krasbeek (The Drunkard). Genre artist of the 18th century Jan Horemans imitated Teniers' works. In The Singing Lesson he depicted a master playing on the cello alongside a lady holding a book. Both these personages are taken by Horemans from D. Teniers' Self Portrait (Gemaeldegalerie, Berlin-Dahlen). D. Teniers enjoyed enormous fame during his lifetime. During the 18th and 19th centuries, his name was so popular in Belgium, his homeland, that he was the subject of songs and even the hero of comic operas, one of which was called Teniers or the Flemish Wedding. |
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