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'A Guardroom with Soldiers', 1630-1640
David Teniers the Younger
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Dutch genre paintings of the
17th century, such as 'A Guardroom with Soldiers',
were popular and highly prized by English connoisseurs
and collectors of the 18th and 19th centuries. A
genre painting is essentially a scene of modern
life, very often a scene of low life: the interior
of a kitchen, for instance, a tavern or a brothel.
The protagonists are ordinary servants, or drinkers
engaged in activities appropriate to the setting:
preparing food, cleaning, smoking, gambling or drinking.
The tavern genre picture usually incorporates a
servant girl resisting the advances of an amorous
drunk, and sometimes has a sot urinating in the
background. The interior invariably contains at
least one, and sometimes two or three 'still lives',
piles of vegetables, hanging meat, heaps of plates,
stacks of tools, perhaps an abandoned meal on the
table. The sole purpose of the 'still life' is to
show off the painter's skill. Genre pictures are
usually of a modest size, making carefully arranged
mundane objects seem even more admirable for being
painted in microscopic detail. It was the technical
skill of the painter that was the attraction, not
necessarily the beauty of the picture, and least
of all the uplifting nature of the subject matter.
These pictures were so popular in England and across
Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries that an
early 20th-century guide book to Holland has the
following: 'It is unfortunate that these works are
rarely to be met with in Dutch collections, as the
greater number have been transferred to foreign
galleries, so that Holland is no longer exclusively
the place where the genre painters of the Netherlands
can be studied.'
One man who became heartily sick of the fashion
for such pictures among the English middle class
and aristocracy was the painter Benjamin Robert
Haydon. He firmly believed that Art should elevate
and instruct, and that the only art worthy of the
name was 'High Art'. Dutch genre was, by its very
nature, Low. "I have lately refused every invitation
to dine out", he grumbled in his Journal of
1808:
"[because of] the imbecile, tiresome, technical
nonsense of Dutch connoisseurship, "how cleverly
that is painted." Etc. etc., - after dinner
someone takes a candle and walks over to an insipid
Dutch painting, of a woman and a boy, with cabbages,
potatoes, & red herrings, a cat, a brass pan,
and some carrots, - then all are in raptures, "what
an exquisite imitation, look at the carrots, look
at the herrings, well we must take that down"
– down it's taken - put on a chair; then My
Lord & My Lady, and Master & Miss, all crowd
round this inimitable carrot Picture, lost in rapture
& delight... To hear terms that would be applicable
to the highest beauties of Art applied to a tame,
insipid, smooth, flat, mindless imitation of carrots
- Good God, is this the end of Art, is this the
use of Painting?"
The guard room or barracks scene was yet another
popular sub-genre, called in Dutch wachtlokaal or
koortegaardje. It arose in the early 1620s and lasted
until the 1670s. It has been estimated that there
were about 13 painters who specialised only in guard
room scenes during the second quarter of the century.
Many others, like David Teniers the Younger, treated
the theme occasionally. Unlike the kitchen, tavern
or brothel genre scenes, the guard room is an exclusively
male environment and, surprisingly, there is little
drunkenness. Gambling seems to be the main leisure
occupation. The most prominent group in this picture
is playing cards, and a faint sketch of an owl and
a pair of spectacles pinned to the wall above them
is intended as a moralising comment upon the foolishness
of such activity, referring as it does to the Dutch
proverb: 'What good are glasses if the owl refuses
to see.' In a further recess more men are playing
cards, although in semi darkness. Beyond the series
of interiors, each one variably lit, is an exterior
scene of sea and coastal defences.
A man appears to be going on duty carrying his arquebus.
The name of the weapon derives from the Dutch work
Haak or hook and bus meaning box. This soldier carries
the forked stick necessary to support the weight
of the barrel when firing it. As with any other
Dutch genre picture the still life is of primary
importance, a virtuoso demonstration of meticulously
detailed painting intended to be examined closely
by the connoisseur lucky enough to own it. At the
right is a pair of kettle drums designed to be slung
across a horse's saddle and beaten by wooden sticks
with a two-inch diameter disc on the end, productive
of a very crisp sound. The pile of armour, towards
the left, is anachronistic. By Teniers' day such
equipment was becoming obsolete and the style of
armour in the picture belongs more to the 16th century
than the 17th. This might suggest that the pile
of armour is on its way to the scrap heap instead
of having just been taken off by the card players.
It might, on the other hand, be plunder. Yet another
sub-genre, closely related to the guard room picture,
was the plunder picture, in which soldiers argue
over the division of their spoils. Soldiers at this
time were ill paid and badly provisioned and had
to supplement their earnings with loot.
David Teniers' 'Guard Room with Soldiers' was originally
bought by John Pemberton Heywood (1755–1835),
a Wakefield barrister. The collection was inherited
by his grandson who expanded it, buying mainly Dutch
genre pictures. It is on long-term loan to the Walker
Art Gallery, along with another typical Dutch genre
subject: 'Jan Steen's Boors Playing a Game'.
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© National Museums Liverpool.
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