The Country Pub

The painting, The Country Pub, signed D. Teniers F.(ecit) in the upper tract, offers same complex pictorial approach, its subject and artistic manner clearly showing it to be a product of the artist’s most creative period. The first thing that strikes the eye is the masterful way in which the painter handles the play of shadow and light, in recreating the spatial diversity of the shabby interior of a pub basement, from the flight of stairs leading to the upper floor, to the lateral extension of the room in the middle tract and ending in the apparently minor compositional element of the recess. As is frequently the case in Teniers’s work, the interior is a dirty shambles, with miss-matched and dilapidated furniture, with a half keg for a table and stumps for stools. ©Dana Roxana Hrib, European Art Gallery Guidebook, Second edition, Sibiu 2011.