There is at the Louvre no picture by the elder David Teniers (1582-1649), who therefore only interests us here as the father and first master of the much greater artist David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), who completed his artistic education under Rubens, without, however, abdicating his own personality. Indeed, those of his pictures which reflect the manner of Rubens too closely are of little account in the achievement of the younger Teniers, who only begins to be himself when he devotes his prolific brush to the social life of his contemporaries, and especially of the lower classes. His pictures constitute the most realistic and convincing record of the tastes, manners, and amusements of his time. His types are full of character, but without the exaggerations so often found in Brueghel and Brouwer. What he retained of Rubens, even in his Village Fêtes, Tavern Scenes, Dances, and Carousals is the application of the great master’s principles of light and harmonious colour. But apart from this, he rejected the “grand style” and the conscious search for beauty. The ugliness of his types and gestures led Louis XIV. to exclaim in front of his pictures, “_Ôtez-moi ces magots-là!_” Few painters are as exhaustively represented at the Louvre as the younger Teniers. The Catalogue includes no fewer than thirty-nine entries under his name, two of which, in the La Caze collection (Nos. 2189 and 2190), are copies after pictures by Lotto and Titian respectively in the collection of the Archduke Leopold William, Governor of the Netherlands, to whom Teniers was appointed Court painter. It would serve no purpose here to enumerate the long list of Kermesse, Village Fête, and Alehouse Scenes in the French national collection. Among his most deservedly famous masterpieces is _The Return of the Prodigal Son_ (No. 2156), which belongs to a series of which another scene is to be seen at the Dulwich Gallery. The subject is really only a thinly veiled excuse for the painting of a _genre_ piece of the contemporary life of the better classes of his country. The scene of the feast is laid outside a country inn that figures in many of Teniers’s pictures. Fully signed, and dated 1644, the picture belongs to the beginning of Teniers’s very best period. In _The Temptation of St. Anthony_ (No. 2158) he rivals Bosch in the invention of grotesquely fantastic monsters. Among other important works by the master in the Louvre must be mentioned _The Denial of St. Peter_ (No. 2155), a painting of exquisite silvery quality, signed and dated DAVID TENIERS, f. AN. 1646; _The Works of Mercy_ (No. 2157); the _Village Fête_ (No. 2159); and the _Peasants dancing by an Inn Door_ (No. 2161), which was stolen from the collection in 1815 and returned in the following year with a letter explaining that it had been removed by a Frenchman who feared that it might fall into the hands of the Allied Forces.