Fishermen returning to shore with their catch, in the background other fisherman beneath a lighthouse on a cliff

Margret Klinge described this painting – which she dated to the 1660s on account of its colour, design and technique – as an ‘impressive seapiece’ when she selected it for inclusion in the monographic exhibition on David Teniers II staged at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp in 1991 (op. cit.). On account of this dating, the work must have been painted either in Brussels or in the studio Teniers maintained in his country house ‘de Drij Toren’ (‘the Three Towers’) near Perk. Teniers had acquired the estate from Jean-Baptise de Brouchoven, 1st Count of Bergeyk (1619-1681) and the second husband of Sir Peter Paul Rubens’s widow, Helena Fourment (1614-1673), by 1662.

The present painting can be compared with a smaller painting of similar subject, the artist’s Three fishermen setting out their nets formerly in the collection of Dr. Mañuel R. Espirito Santo Silva in Lisbon, which was painted in Antwerp in the second half of the 1640s (fig. 1). The compositions of the two paintings are quite similar and, as Klinge has proposed (op. cit.), may well be derived from the same now-unidentified compositional sketches. In this later example, however, the figures and still-life elements are given greater prominence, with the latter displayed across the painting’s foreground. A third, small-scale painting of the same period in a private collection gives similar prominence to the day’s catch (see Klinge, op. cit., p. 242, fig. 83a).

The increased attention the artist has paid to the fishermen and fish here draws a clear association with water and the sea, and the painting itself may well have been intended to serve as an allegory of water. Whether it once formed part of a series of the Four Elements cannot be stated with certitude, as no examples of similar scale depicting earth, wind or fire appear to have come down to us.