A Feast at Harvest-Time, with the House of Drij Toren in the Background, c.1667-69 (oil...

By 1662 Teniers had purchased a country estate called Drij Toren (‘Three Towers’) from Rubens’s widow’s second husband; this is the picturesque moated castle which appears in the background of this painting. In front of the castle corn is being harvested and in the foreground the peasantry are assembled outside an inn having a street party, listening to a piper, presumably to celebrate the Harvest Home. The sun breaking through the clouds seems to bless the scene. Teniers sets out an orderly vision of the natural and human society, with the rustic episodes in the foreground – labour on the land and celebration of its bounty – leading the eye back to the lord’s manor which seems to offer protection and benign rule. Dutch landscapes of the same date offered a different, less universal and less ‘structured’ image of society.