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Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig
David Teniers the Youngerc.1650
Dulwich Picture Gallery
London, United Kingdom
A rare scene in Teniers' production, but a traditional Flemish theme popularized in the 16th century by Pieter Brueghel (grandfather to Teniers' first wife), the slaughtering of the pig enlivens this otherwise cold peasant scene. The whole family gathers for the ritual of life and death: the husband sharpens his knife and the wife holds a pan to collect the blood - nothing shall be wasted. Teniers' delicate brushwork and the choice of a warm, earthy palette for the killing scene contrast with the silvery winter tones of the rest of the composition.
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Details
- Title: Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig
- Creator Lifespan: 1610 - 1690
- Date: c.1650
- Physical Dimensions: w957 x h689 cm
- Type: Painting
- Medium: Oil
- Work Notes: Engraving (presumably P. F. Laurent, 1739-1809).
- Work Nationality: Flemish
- Support: Canvas
- Provenance: ? (Probably in France, according to Murray 1980); London, Noel Desenfans, ?1786-1807: ?London, Christie's, Desenfans private sale, 8ff. Apr. 1786, lot 144 ('Village in Flanders, a Frost piece'. 37 x 49 in, including frame); Evening Mail inventory, 1791-1792 (Teniers Room, 'A Frost Piece'); 1804 Insurance List, no. 94Ð'A Frost Piece'; London, Sir Francis Bourgeois, 1811; Bourgeois Bequest, 1811.
- Inscriptions: Signed, bottom centre: 'DT.F.' (DT in monogram)
- Further Information: The depiction of the slaughter of pigs in preparation for Christmas can be traced back to mediaeval books of hours, and was often associated with winter in series of the Four Seasons. Such scenes were popularized in the 16th century by Pieter Bruegel, the grandfather of Teniers’s first wife. If Teniers did not encounter those compositions at home, or with his family, he certainly saw them in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, of which he was the keeper. We do not know whether it was paired with a ‘Summer’, or formed part of a set of the seasons. It was probably painted in the 1660s. The depiction of the row of houses at the left seems to be Teniers’s own invention, but the perspective is remarkably clumsy. Winter landscapes are quite rare in Teniers’s work, but there are some similarities between the composition here (houses on the left, tree on the right, and a road starting in the middle and going off obliquely to the right in the background) with a winter scene of a peasant driving pigs through a village that was sold at Sotheby’s on 30 January 1998 (lot 234). An engraving by André Laurent shows that in 1744 the picture was in the collection of Pierre Remy, one of the foremost Parisian dealers of pre-Revolutionary France and it was likely already with Desenfans in 1786.
- Artist: Teniers, David the younger
- Acquisition Method: Bourgeois, Sir Peter Francis (Bequest, 1811)
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