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1 of 253523 objects
The Drummer Signed and dated 1647
Oil on copper | 49.5 x 65.3 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external) | RCIN 406577
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Military subjects were popular on either side of the frontier during the Eighty Years War (1568-1648). The most common image of the soldier’s life was the guard-room scene, a glamorous version of the tavern scene, where soldiers smoke, drink and play cards. This painting may have been executed for Teniers’s master, the Archduke Leopold William, who was commander-in-chief of the Spanish army in Flanders. It is rare in depicting the camp rather than the guard-room, but tries to convey the same aimless boredom of military life. Almost all military scenes provide an excuse for the artist to depict a still life of as many different weapons as possible; the glint of light off steel is rendered especially effectively here on this painting executed on the reflective medium of copper.
Flemish artists like Jan Brueghel had made a speciality of depicting allegorical figures surrounded by the attributes or results of the thing they personify: the element of Fire, for example, might be surrounded by a huge pile of metal objects which had been created in the heat of a forge. The same convention is employed here and in the Old Woman peeling Turnips (Royal Collection); she could be an allegory of hearth and home balanced by a pile of vegetables; the drummer here could be an allegory of war matched by a pile of armour.
Signed and dated lower left: D. TENIERS.F.1647
Catalogue entry adapted from Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting, London, 2007Provenance
Acquired by George IV in 1803; recorded in the Anti Room to the Dining Room at Carlton House in 1819 (no 84); in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace in 1841 (no 179)
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Medium and techniques
Oil on copper
Measurements
49.5 x 65.3 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)
72.6 x 87.9 x 7.4 cm (frame, external)
Category
Object type(s)
Other number(s)
Alternative title(s)
'Le Tambour-battant'
Featured in
ExhibitionMasters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer: The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace
Presenting 28 masterpieces from the Royal Collection, the exhibition includes works by Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, Jan Steen and Pieter de Hooch, and Johannes Vermeer's 'A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman'.
ExhibitionBruegel to Rubens: The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace
This first exhibition ever mounted of Flemish paintings in the Royal Collection
ExhibitionMasterpieces from Buckingham Palace: The Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse
Some of the most important paintings in the Royal Collection from the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace