(Antwerp 1610–1690 Brussels)
A peasant cleaning mussels,
signed lower right: D Teniers fec.,
oil on canvas, 27 x 37 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 4 March 1997, lot 107;
Private collection, Vienna

We are grateful to Margret Klinge for confirming the attribution of the present painting to David Teniers the Younger after examination in the original. She dates it in the time of Teniers’s sojourn in Brussels, at the end of the 1660s. A written certificate, from February 2023, is available.

The present painting is listed in the RKD database under no. 27283 (as David Teniers II).

This peaceful domestic scene depicts a shabbily-dressed man absorbed in the act of cleaning mussels, as a young family warm themselves by the fire. Despite the somewhat drab and sparsely furnished interior, a certain poignancy and attention to detail is provided by the artist. The cluttered scene of shimmering jugs and pots shows Teniers’ ability in rendering different textures.

Though a typical example of the sort of genre paintings that made Teniers so greatly prized by Antwerp dealers, he was in fact an extremely versatile master, who was able to reproduce Italianate paintings for his patron, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg Regent in Brussels, along with these bucolic genre scenes.