Description

Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac and The Abduction of Europa are among the more than 200 lively, small-scale copies by David Teniers the Younger recording the superb art collection of his patron, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. They were created as models for the engraved illustrations in a catalogue of the archduke’s collection, which was printed and made available for purchase by the public as the Theatrum Pictorium (Theater of painting) in 1660. A prolific painter of peasant subjects and other everyday scenes, Teniers also served as the archduke’s curator.

Provenance

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, sold, Christie’s, London, July 26, 1886, no. 133 to Thomas Agnew & Sons for £21 [according to annotated catalogue at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorisch Documentatie, The Hague]; sold by Agnew’s to Charles Hutchinson, Chicago, September 24, 1886, died October 7, 1924 [copy of receipt in curatorial file]; his widow Frances Kinsley Hutchinson, died 1936; bequeathed to the Art Institute in 1936.