David Teniers the Younger or David Teniers II was a Flemish Baroque painter, printmaker, draughtsman, miniaturist painter, staffage painter, copyist and art curator. He was an extremely versatile artist known for his prolific output. He was an innovator in a wide range of genres such as history painting, genre painting, landscape painting, portrait and still life. He is now best remembered as the leading Flemish genre painter of his day. Teniers is particularly known for developing the peasant genre, the tavern scene, pictures of collections and scenes with alchemists and physicians. He was court painter and the curator of the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the art-loving Governor General of the Habsburg Netherlands. He created a printed catalogue of the collections of the Archduke. He was the founder of the Antwerp Academy, where young artists were trained to draw and sculpt in the hope of reviving Flemish art after its decline following the death of the leading Flemish artists Rubens and Anthony van Dyck in the early 1640s. He influenced the next generation of Northern genre painters as well as French Rococo painters such as Antoine Watteau. He was the son and pupil of David Teniers the Elder. In 1637 he married Anna, daughter of the painter Jan Bruegel the Elder. Teniers painted almost every kind of picture, but chiefly genre scenes of peasant life, many of which were subsequently used for tapestry designs in the 18th century. His early works in this vein show the influence of Adriaen Brouwer (e.g., Peasants Playing Music). Many of his finer works date from 1640 to 1650. He was brilliant at handling crowd scenes in an open landscape and adept at characterizing his figures with a warm, human, and often humorous touch (e.g., The Village Fête, 1646). His landscape settings are atmospheric, and his still-life details precise. In the same decade he also painted a number of monumental processions (e.g., Procession of the Antwerp Civic Guards, 1643). Teniers developed a second career in 1651 when he moved to Brussels, becoming court painter and keeper of the art collections to the regent of the Netherlands, the archduke Leopold William. He painted several views of the archduke’s picture gallery (e.g., The Archduke Leopold William in His Picture Gallery in Brussels, c. 1651; Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna). He also made many small-scale individual copies of paintings in the archduke’s collection by foreign artists, especially Italians. Of these, 244 were engraved in 1660 under the title Theatrum Pictorium. As a pictorial inventory of a great 17th-century collection, this book of engravings was unique in its time and still constitutes a valuable source for the art historian. Teniers was also court painter to Don John of Austria, who succeeded the archduke as regent in 1656, and was one of the prime movers in the foundation of the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1663) and subsequently the Academy in Antwerp (1665). Teniers’s son, also named David (1638–85), often imitated his father’s work. There are several of his altarpieces in churches in Belgium.