David Teniers the Younger became a master painter in the Antwerp St. Luke’s Guild in 1632 after an apprenticeship with his father. In 1637 he married Anna, the youngest daughter and heiress of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and served as Master of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament in the St. Jacobskerk, a post he held until 1639. He was elected dean of St. Luke’s Guild in 1644 and was working for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the southern Netherlands, by 1647. In 1651 he was appointed court painter. He moved from Antwerp to Brussels in 1656 and bought a building near the archducal palace that he had rebuilt as a house and studio. His patrons included Leopold Willem’s successor, Don Juan of Austria, Prince Willem II of Orange, Queen Christina of Sweden, and Philip IV of Spain. He used his prominent post at the court to lobby for the establishment of an art academy in Antwerp modelled on those in Paris and Rome.
The range of themes taken up by David Teniers the Younger was extremely wide, and amongst his many skills was a talent for depicting animals. The present pair of paintings portray a company of monkeys who are eating and drinking wine, sucking on fruits and playing cards. An animal imitating the behaviour of people is a theme whose roots go far back into the fables of Classical literature and to medieval zoological treatises. Such subjects, as in the present pair of paintings, were intended as a humorous method of instruction. It meant that he who gives himself over to sensuous pleasures, following his instincts and entrapped by earthly and sensual desires, descends to the beastly level of the monkey.
Teniers’ compositions are not simply an amusing parody of those who give themselves up to the pleasures of the flesh, but excellent pictures, in which the artist skilfully displays his mastery of painting.

In the present pair of paintings, David Teniers characteristically dresses his monkeys as soldiers, notorious for their drinking and gambling. Nicolas Veerendael, a generation younger than Jan Brueghel II and David Teniers, produced a drawing in which monkeys take the part of naughty schoolboys being punished by their monkey schoolmaster. Monkeys in Flemish art can thus be seen as an alter ego for man, embodying at worst all his sinful qualities, and at best his faintly ludicrous weaknesses. This pair was made when Teniers was active in Brussels in the late 1650s and early 1660s. The artist had been painting monkeys since 1633. A preparatory drawing for the Monkeys smoking and drinking is in the collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 20527).

Monkeys played a role in Flemish art throughout the 17th century. The famous painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Chained Monkeys, in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, is a fine example of the early Flemish tradition of representing monkeys in paintings. In this work, two chained monkeys look out at the harbour of Antwerp. Monkeys were also painted by Jan Brueghel the Younger, engaged in Tulip Mania: buying, selling, growing, stealing and even urinating on tulips.