The Guardhouse (c. 1645): Artwork and History

The Guardhouse (c. 1645) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as David Teniers the Younger (Flemish, 1610-1690).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: The Guardhouse
• Date: c. 1645
• Artist attribution: David Teniers the Younger (Flemish, 1610-1690)
• Place of origin: Flanders
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• 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.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1894.1029

Collection credit

Charles L. Hutchinson Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.