The apothecary - David Teniers II (1610 - 1690)

DAVID TENIERS II
1610 - 1690
The Apothecary
Oil on panel
Provenance: Collection Marquis de Calvière, Château de Vézénobres
Dimensions: 12,5 cm
THE ARTIST
David Teniers the Younger, also known as David Teniers II, was one of the most versatile and prolific Flemish Baroque painters. Baptized in Antwerp in 1610, he became the leading genre painter of his generation, producing an estimated two thousand works throughout his career. His extraordinary range encompassed history paintings, landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, though he is best remembered for his vivid depictions of peasant life, tavern interiors, alchemists, and physicians.
Trained initially by his father, David Teniers the Elder, and later influenced by Adriaen Brouwer, Teniers refined the genre scene into a form of moralized observation, combining humor, realism, and social commentary. His works often reveal a delicate balance between rustic vitality and urban sophistication, expressed through his masterful control of color, light, and narrative detail.
Appointed court painter and curator to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Teniers played a central role in cataloguing and copying the Archduke’s art collection, a task that led to the creation of the celebrated Theatrum Pictorium (1660), the first printed catalogue of a private art collection.
THE ARTWORK
In The Apothecary, Teniers presents a lively figure engaged in the preparation or display of a medicinal concoction. Dressed in rustic yet colorful attire, the apothecary gestures animatedly toward his workbench, surrounded by jars, bottles, and glass flasks. Despite the small format of the panel, Teniers’s precision in gesture, expression, and material detail imbues the scene with striking vitality.
This composition belongs to Teniers’s broader fascination with the world of alchemy and early medicine, a recurring subject in his oeuvre that bridges the realms of science, superstition, and satire. In seventeenth-century Flanders, depictions of alchemists and apothecaries often carried moral undertones—serving as reflections on human folly, greed, or the pursuit of vain knowledge. Yet in Teniers’s hands, these figures are rendered with empathy and wit, transforming everyday labor into a stage of curiosity and theatricality.
The intimate circular format, coupled with the vibrant palette and the expressive character of the figure, makes this small painting a quintessential example of Teniers’s ability to blend humor, observation, and painterly finesse within even the most modest of scales.