The Guardhouse
David Teniers the Younger (Flemish, 1610-1690)
c. 1645
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 72.6 × 55.4 cm (28 9/16 × 21 13/16 in.); Framed: 87 × 69.9 × 5.1 cm (34 1/4 × 27 1/2 × 2 in.)
- Culture
- Flanders
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Charles L. Hutchinson Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The versatile Flemish painter David Teniers turned to military paraphernalia as the subject of his still lifes in the mid-1640s, as the long conflict of the Thirty Years’ War was drawing to a close. Here soldiers play cards in the dim interior of a guardhouse, while a page carries the officers’ cloaks. However, the chief subject of the work is the pile of discarded armor, weaponry, and parade gear—a saddle, musket, powder horn, charging spanner, and gauntlets—in the immediate foreground. In treating armor as a still-life subject, Teniers followed the precedent of Jan Breughel the Elder, whose daughter he had married.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
