St George’s Day Kermis

David Teniers the Younger, court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in Brussels and a founding member of the Antwerp Academy, was the most influential Flemish genre painter of his generation. In this late fair scene he returns to the peasant subject matter that made his name, charting a middle path between the earthy humour of his Antwerp forbears and the more refined, lighter register that endeared him to aristocratic collectors across Europe.