In this peasant scene, which is datable to the second half of the 1640s, Teniers’s painting manner has attained an almost impressionist looseness while his palette has lost nothing of its refinement. The composition is simple but effective. The field play is bounded on two sides by thatched houses standing at right angles to each other. On the opposite side we look past a tree and over a fence into wide meadows. In the hazy distance are a church and a few houses set among trees. The artist enlivened the varied but tonal palette with a few well-chosen accents such as the bright blue jacket of the man with his back to us and the landlord’s red cap. Especially captivating and adding to the sense of space is the fresh blue of the sky.

David Teniers the Younger was the son of the painter and art dealer David Teniers the Elder and Dymphna de Wilde. He was initially trained in his father’s studio and they collaborated on pictures. The older Teniers mainly executed landscapes with religious or mythological scenes showing the influence of Adam Elsheimer. Teniers the Younger entered the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1632/33, specialising in low-life interior genre pieces and landscapes enlivened with peasants. From the outset his pictures were greatly in demand. Owing to his enormous output he soon became one of the most recognized painters in Flanders and in the process rapidly attained a fortune. David Teniers’s social status is indicated by his marriage in 1637 to Anna Brueghel, daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder, with Peter Paul Rubens acting as a witness. In 1645/46 David Teniers was dean of the Antwerp guild. He soon attracted the attention of the governor general, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm who gave him commissions in 1647. In 1651 he even entered Leopold Wilhelm’s service, moving to the latter’s court in Brussels. At the same time he was appointed director of the Archduke’s impressive picture collection. In May 1656 Teniers’s first wife died. In the same year Leopold Wilhelm left for Vienna. The artist remarried in October of that same year with Isabella de Fren and continued working for the Brussels court, now serving Don Juan of Austria (1656-59) and various other noble patrons. In 1663, Teniers bought the castle ‘Dry Toren’ and in the following year became the driving force behind the foundation of the Antwerp Academy. In 1686, Teniers’s second wife died. The painter himself died in 1690, surviving his son David III, who was also a painter.