Invention and the Court Copyist: David Teniers the Younger and Gallery Paintings Andrea Keppers As a court painter to the Hapsburg Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, from royal favor; it was one of the best ways to attain honor David Teniers the Younger became something of a specialist and fame, not to mention financial security. Having a connec- in the creation of gallery paintings, such as The Archduke’s tion to and the support of a princely patron elevated the artist Picture Gallery in Brussels, painted after 1654 (Figure 1). and in a sense legitimized his practice. While the position of Teniers depicted himself standing proudly next to the arch- court painter was coveted, it came with a degree of servitude duke and holding onto The Madonna of the Cherries by Titian that troubled some artists. Rubens, for instance, occupied the as if interpreting the painting for its owner. Teniers also in- same position that Teniers did for the governor of the south- cluded portraits of his other benefactors in the collection. Philip ern Netherlands, but demanded and enjoyed much greater free- IV of Spain, who owned several of Teniers’ paintings, is rep- dom. He was exempted from taxes, guild restrictions, and court resented in an oval portrait over the door, and a bust of Queen duties in Brussels so he could remain at home in Antwerp. In Christina of Sweden, from whom Teniers received a golden becoming Leopold Wilhelm’s court painter, Teniers had to chain of honor, hovers above the red-draped corner of Raphael’s move himself and his family from Antwerp to Brussels to re- St. Margaret in the foreground. Teniers is dressed like a noble- main in residence at court.2 Perhaps to combat this sense of man, wearing a sword and a golden chain given to him by indenture, Teniers began a life-long quest for nobility. These Leopold Wilhelm, from which hang the cameral keys, signi- aspirations were not uncommon among artists of the time, but fying his position as chamberlain or valet. It was highly desir- they underscore Teniers’ desire to become something more able to be a court painter and to receive the attendant honors, than a court painter.3 as Teniers demonstrates in this gallery painting. Yet for all of Throughout his career Teniers sought after hereditary Teniers’ self-aggrandizement, as an artist he is overshadowed honors and used his connections at court to reinstate his fam- in this gallery hung with works not of his own invention, but ily coat of arms and title. From 1657 his social aspirations are by other masters’ hands. The works for which he was known, well documented: he petitioned the King of Spain to grant paintings of tavern-goers, smokers, and peasant kermises, are him a patent of nobility on the basis of his official position at not present in his painted galleries, rather it is his physical court and his descent from Flemish military heroes.4 The King presence and royal obligations that speak to his identity. This replied that he would be glad to grant the letters of nobility on study proposes that Teniers’ gallery paintings suggest an in- the condition that Teniers refrain from exercising his art pub- herent struggle between imitation and invention. As such, the licly or for profit, that he, in effect, stop painting. It is not paintings are a site of anxiety about the position of the court known if Teniers refused this condition, or if the process was painter and the status of imitation. tied up in the Spanish bureaucracy, but he did not receive his The eight years Teniers spent in the archduke’s service coat of arms until 1680.5 This episode demonstrates that the demanded of him a number of duties. He was required to paint practice of painting was not always compatible with the status anything Leopold Wilhelm requested, from gallery paintings of gentleman. Teniers had Rubens and Velazquez as his mod- to genre scenes to hunting portraits of the archduke. As keeper els, but was never able to achieve the same level of nobility of the collection, Teniers advised the archduke on the care that they enjoyed. and display of his possessions and was involved with the pur- The collection Teniers maintained was one of the biggest chasing of new works. His responsibilities as valet to the arch- in Europe, but Leopold Wilhelm had to build it almost from duke were of a more personal nature and kept him tied closely scratch. Just before he began his governorship of the Spanish to court life. Leopold Wilhelm was even the godfather to Netherlands, the archduke dispatched one of his early court Teniers’ sixth child.1 For an artist, so much could be gained painters to Antwerp on a mission to initiate the royal 1 David Teniers, Jan Brueghel y Los Gabinetes de Pintura (Madrid: Museo 225-42, and Martin Warmke, The Court Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge del Prado, 1992) 238. UP, 1993). 2 Margret Klinge, David Teniers the Younger (Antwerp: Snoek-Ducaju & 4 Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp (Princeton: Princeton UP, Zoon, 1991) 21. 1987) 141. 3 For a discussion of Teniers’ contemporaries as court painters, see Madlyn 5 Faith Paulette Dreher, “David Teniers II Again,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977): Millner Kahr, “Velázquez and Las Meninas,” Art Bulletin LVII (1975): 108-10. ATHANOR XXIII ANDREA KEPPERS kunstkamer. Writing to an art dealer there, the painter warned factual manner. Teniers’ gallery pictures are visual invento- that “his Highness has said to me that when he comes to ries, and he was so skilled at reproducing famous paintings by Antwerp, he wishes to see all the most beautiful things that great masters that almost every replica he painted in reduced can be seen…in the art of painting, and that he wishes to buy scale can be identified. Certain paintings appear repeatedly, all the most beautiful things that suit him best.”6 It is clear such as Raphael’s St. Margaret and a Danaë then attributed from this passage that the duties of the court painter extended to Titian. He made the attributions doubly certain in some beyond painting and beyond the court. The letter also indi- cases by inscribing the artists’ names on the frames of their cates that Leopold Wilhelm was in a hurry to establish a paint- compositions. All of the paintings reproduced were actually ing collection and hoped to make a large purchase of “all the in the archduke’s collection, and the people depicted are all most beautiful things” as soon as he arrived. It is not known portraits of visitors to the galleries; the one aspect that Teniers what part of his collection resulted from this effort, but he did manipulated for compositional or other reasons is the size and start his gallery with works by Flemish painters. Luckily for layout of the room. It is not known what Leopold Wilhelm’s the archduke, but not so lucky for the beheaded Charles I, the picture galleries in Brussels looked like, but by the sheer vari- English Civil War put the enormous Hamilton collection of ety of rooms Teniers’ depicted containing the same paintings, Italian paintings up for sale in 1651. Having been made it seems clear that he invented these rooms, yet furnished them Leopold Wilhelm’s court painter that year, Teniers was sent with accurate copies of the most famous paintings. to London to supervise the purchase and shipment of paint- None of the dozen gallery paintings Teniers made for his ings for the archduke’s collection. He was also responsible for patron appear in the 1659 inventory of the archduke’s collec- verifying the attribution of the paintings to be purchased. The tion. It appears that the works were not to be kept, but sent as paintings obtained in London made Leopold Wilhelm famous gifts to friends and relatives to spread the fame of the collec- as a collector and formed the largest part of the collection tion. They also spread the fame of the archduke.10 By having with which Teniers was to become intimately familiar. All in Teniers create these grand views of the kunstkamer, Leopold all, the archduke acquired nearly 400 paintings from the sale, Wilhelm proclaimed that he had joined the elite group of and it seems that the establishment of this instant kunstkamer princely collectors that all members of his class should aspire led to the commissions of painted gallery interiors by Teniers.7 to join. In most gallery paintings Teniers portrayed Leopold The genre of the gallery painting was developed at the Wilhelm surveying or discussing, always interacting with his beginning of the seventeenth century in Antwerp, the city collection of famous paintings. This learned interaction, or where David Teniers grew up and trained. Teniers took what provocative conversation is the true purpose of a painting col- began as an allegorical genre in a documentary direction. Pre- lection, and the means through which a collector is intellectu- viously, gallery paintings were imaginary spaces filled with ally and spiritually uplifted. While there is no way of know- non-existent works or ideal collections assembled to assert a ing how the recipients regarded the gallery paintings, it is moral or to make visible some intangible quality. Teniers’ in- possible that they were viewed as the crass self-promotion of a vention was the real gallery. In a 1617 work by Rubens and novice collector who stumbled into a significant collection Jan Brueghel the Elder called The Sense of Sight, the fanciful instead of building it with time and careful appreciation. gallery is loaded with every object that might conceivably The gallery pictures also spread Teniers’ fame.