A Peasant

The peasant holds an object in his right hand that looks like a flute, suggesting that David Teniers (1610-1690) is depicting a tavern musician. Humorous scenes of tavern-going peasants were a staple of Teniers’s work. Considered alongside another work in the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection – A Peasant Holding a Glass (DPG106) – which emphasizes the senses of sight and taste, this work’s possible focus on music could mean that these paintings were intended to portray the then popular theme of the Five Senses.

As with A Peasant Holding a Glass (DPG106), this painting of a peasant is also painted on copper. Over a quarter of works in Teniers’s extensive oeuvre were executed on this metal support that perfectly served the artist’s purpose of showing intricate light effects and his love of detail. His familiarity with the support can be traced back to some early works on copper made in collaboration with his father, with whom he trained. Copper was a popular material among numerous Dutch and Flemish painters. Its smooth surface often encouraged a finer manner of painting so Teniers’s sketch-like brushwork in A Peasant is unusual, a style more reminiscent of paintings by Teniers’s contemporary, Adriaen Brouwer (c. 1605-1638).