(Antwerp 1629–1670)
Monkeys in a guardroom interior,
oil on copper, 38.5 x 51 cm, framed

Provenance:
P. Zwaal, Amsterdam;
with D. Katz, Dieren, 1929

Literature:
B. Schepers, La folie des singes à Anvers au XVIIe siècle, in: F. Boulerie and K. Bartha-Kovács (eds.), Le singe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Figure de l’art, personnage littéraire et curiosité scientifique, Paris 2019, pp. 153-172;
B. Schepers, Monkey Madness in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp, in: Pictura Nova: Studies in 16th- and 17th-Century Flemish Painting and Drawing, XXV, Turnhout, cat. A76 (publication forthcoming)

We are grateful to Bert Schepers of the Centrum Rubenianum, Antwerp, for endorsing the attribution of the present painting to Abraham Teniers on the basis of a photograph and for his kind assistance in cataloguing the present lot.

The present lively interior scene, showing a militia of monkeys engaged in card-playing, pipe-smoking and lounging rakishly around a guard-room fire is a typically vibrant and humorous work from the hand of Abraham Teniers. The innovative lighting effects heighten the sense of comic drama and are rendered by the burning brand on the left held by one of the maquette-cum-soldiers and shadowed by the bent figure in the foreground, the smoking hearth behind, and the glowing lantern above. The arrest of a cat, whose presumable transgression may not only be the crime of being feline, but perhaps also symbolising another vice, is typical of such a well-worked satirical scene from Teniers.

Abraham Teniers was the younger brother of David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) and often repeated compositions of the latter, in which he introduced small variations. While David was characterised by his immense artistic versatility, Abraham specialised particularly in different types of genre scenes such as the present singerie. Three other versions of the present composition are known, one of which, in the collection of the Berner Zunftgesellschaft zum Affen (likewise on copper and of near identical size: 39.3 x 51.2 cm), was recently exhibited in the Kunstmuseum in Bern (Affen in Menschengestalt: die Singeries der Zunft zum Affen, 8 June – 29 August 2021; see also: B. Büttner, Die Affen Gottes: Die Zunftgesellschaft zum Affen und ihre Bilder, Brunne Zytig, 15 March 2013, p. 2, repr.).

Abraham served as Captain of the local Schutterij, or militia, and indubitably spent many such raucous nights among his comrades in guardrooms possibly not unlike those depicted in the present work. The substitution of men for monkeys would have made such pictures important talking points, reflecting on vanity and human folly.