Old Masters

David Teniers and the Theatre of Painting

120 pages, cloth/hardback, 260 x 215 mm, 100 illustrations
PRICE: £30.00
ISBN: 978 1 903470 49 7

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Margret Klinge and Others

This is an overdue investigation into one of the most remarkable artistic enterprises of the seventeenth century, much cited but seldom discussed, David Teniers the Younger’s publication in 1660 of the magnificent Theatrum Pictorium or Theatre of Painting, the first illustrated and printed collection catalogue.

In 1651 David Teniers (1610–1690) was appointed painter to the Brussels court of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Hapsburg Netherlands and proud owner of one of the finest princely collections in Europe. Teniers first documented this collection in a now famous series of detailed views of the interior of the Archduke’s picture gallery. The Archduke having returned to Vienna in 1656, his collection forms the core of the present Kunsthistorisches Museum. But by this time Teniers had already embarked on a far more ambitious project, a lavishly illustrated single-volume catalogue of 243 of the Archduke’s Italian paintings. When Teniers finally published the Theatrum Pictorium in 1656 it immediately attracted widespread attention and praise.

Fundamental to the project was Teniers’s production of small copies in oil of each of the selected paintings for use by the Theatrum’s engravers. Measuring c. 17 x 25 cm, these copies are of great beauty and skill in their own right; fourteen belong to the Courtauld Gallery, and many more as well are illustrated in this book.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in autumn 2006, the book provides a detailed and richly layered account of this extraordinary project, based on the study of Teniers’s copies, of each of the four editions of the Theatrum and of views of the interior of the Archduke’s picture gallery.

Joanna Woodall, a distinguished authority on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, especially portraiture, is Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Margret Klinge is the author of the definitive work on Teniers, David Teniers the Younger: Paintings, Drawings (1991).

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