1655
oil
panel
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
The Abduction of Europa is a 1655 oil by David Teniers the Younger, a Baroque work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
You see a bull carrying a woman across a stormy sea while tiny cupids fly above them. This painting tells the old Greek myth of Europa, but Teniers makes it feel like a farmyard scene—note the bull’s calm face and the woman’s relaxed grip. The story usually feels grand; here it’s almost funny. If you like how myths get a quiet twist, look up the technique called *glazing*.
Presumably John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, died 1722 [it is presumed that he was the purchaser of the Blenheim set of 120 copies made by Teniers as models for engravings forming part of a larger group of small copies after paintings in the collection of Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm]; his daughter, Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, certainly by 1728, when the copies were seen by Pierre Jacques Fougeroux [see Methuen-Campbell, 2006, p. 61]; by descent in the collection of the dukes of Marlborough to George Charles Spencer-Churchill, 8th Duke of Marlborough,…
Art Institute of Chicago, Recent Accessions to the Permanent Collections of the Art Institute, December 22 – January 24, 1937, no cat. Florence, Italy, Galleria degli Uffizi, Il Mito di Europa: da fanciulla rapita a continente, June 11, 2002 – January 6, 2003, no. 18.
George Scharf, Catalogue Raisonné; or, A List of the Pictures in the Private Apartments of Blenheim Palace; with Occasional Remarks and Illustrative Notes (London, 1862), vol. II, p. 148, no. 9. Charles Davis, A Collection of One Hundred and Twenty Paintings by David Teniers (From Blenheim Palace): The Property of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough. On Exhibition at Mr. Davis’s Galleries (London, 1884), p. 7, no. 9. Art Institute of Chicago, Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago: Report for the Year Nineteen Hundred Thirty-Six (Chicago, 1937), p. 40. George Vertue, “Notebooks,” The Volume…
Read the full account in the museum source.
David Teniers the Younger or David Teniers II was a Flemish Baroque painter, printmaker, and artist.
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