Landscape with Peasants and a Washerwoman

Based in Antwerp, David Teniers produced a wide range of works, from portraits and religious paintings to interior genre scenes and landscapes with figures. Teniers’s small landscape paintings were most likely created for wealthy city dwellers and merchants in Antwerp who decorated their homes with “cabinet pictures” such as this one. Departing significantly from his earlier satirical depictions of country life, here Teniers painted an idyllic scene in which peasants are innocent and in harmony with nature. Such treatment of the subject reflects a new attitude toward the countryside in 17th-century Flanders, which then could be appreciated as a place of peace, tranquility, and nostalgia, far from the intensity of urbanism and commerce and from the devastation of the prolonged Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648).