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Winter
David Teniers the Youngerc.1650-80
Dulwich Picture Gallery
London, United Kingdom
"In this winter scene a chimney sweeper carries his tool over his shoulder as he leaves the village on a snowy road. He must have completed his work successfully as smoke is coming out of the chimneys in the background.
This painting, once titled Winter, was paired with Autumn (DPG141) and thought to belong to an allegorical series of the Four Seasons. However, during conservation it was revealed that the canvas was at some point enlarged to make it match the dimensions of the other painting. It seems more likely that the painter wanted to represent an independent genre scene. "
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Details
- Title: Winter
- Creator Lifespan: 1610 - 1690
- Date: c.1650-80
- Physical Dimensions: w429 x h670 cm
- Type: Painting
- Medium: Oil
- Work Nationality: Flemish
- Support: Canvas
- Studio of: Teniers, David the younger
- Provenance: London, Noel Desenfans, 1802-1807: London, Skinner and Dyke, Desenfans sale, 17 Mar. 1802, lot 68 (Descriptive Catalogue no. 96: The Four Seasons, in 4 Pictures [The first represents the spring, under the figure of a gardener, who is carrying in a pot of earth, an orange tree in flower; at a distance is seen a building in a parterre, where other gardeners are at work. The second offers us, summer under the figure of a reaper, who holds a scythe; and the distance, a field of corn, where numbers of men and women are gathering in the harvest. The third, to represent autumn, is a man near a few barrels, upon which are some grapes. He is crowned with vine leaves, a bottle of new wine in one hand, and a glass in the other: at a distance is a vineyard, where men are gathering grapes. The fourth, as winter, shews us an old man, suffering from cold in a country where the snow is falling. He is dressed in fur, leaning with one hand, upon his stick, and holding in the other, a foot stove. On one side are men skaiting; and at a distance, a village covered with snow] £17.6 for lots (bt in); London, Sir Francis Bourgeois, 1807-1811; Bourgeois Bequest, 1811.
- Further Information: Hunched against the cold of a wintry landscape, a figure carries a long stick over his shoulder, the tool of a chimney-sweep. This painting, once titled Winter, was paired with Autumn (DPG341) and thought to belong to an allegorical series of the Four Seasons. However, during conservation it was revealed that the canvas was enlarged on two sides to match it to the dimensions of DPG341, probably during Bourgeois’ time. Desenfans owned a set of Four Seasons in 1802, but with a different Winter – an old man ‘dressed in fur, leaning with one hand, upon his stick, and holding in the other, a foot stove’, cf. an 18th-century print after Teniers (1749–97, British Museum, London). It is more likely that DPG321 was painted not as a season but as a personification of a type of labourer. Similar figures in a less wintry context appear in a number of other paintings by Teniers (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau.
- Acquisition Method: Bourgeois, Sir Peter Francis (Bequest, 1811)
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