David Teniers the Younger, 'Christ Crowned with Thorns', 1641

David Teniers the Younger is best known today for his scenes of everyday life, but he was a versatile artist. He also produced history paintings, of which this is a masterly example. In a guardroom that looks more like a Flemish tavern than a prison, a crown of thorns is being placed on Christ’s head. This humiliating moment, recounted in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John, was one of a number of such episodes in the lead-up to Christ’s crucifixion.

Christ is seated on a stone block, while a soldier standing behind him forcefully presses the crown of thorns onto his head. Three other men make obscene gestures, and a kneeling youth hands Christ a reed sceptre. Teniers used the most vivid colours for the clothes of the henchmen: red, green and blue tones together with bright white stand in contrast to the paleness of Christ’s naked torso.

Two onlookers peer through a barred window at the upper right. Teniers could have taken this idea from Anthony van Dyck’s painting of the same subject (Museo del Prado, Madrid). In that composition – which Van Dyck probably painted as a gift for Peter Paul Rubens – there is also a bushy spaniel barking at Christ, and the positioning of the group of five watchmen is similar. However, Teniers’s boorish figures, clad in contemporary dress, are more reminiscent of his genre scenes. Various narrative details – the still life in the foreground and the view of the adjacent room, where soldiers sit in front of an open fire – help to bring the biblical scene to life, and make it more tangible. On the far right, a drawing of a laughing peasant is fixed to a wooden partition, a nod to the subject Teniers is best known for and functioning almost like a pictorial signature.

Christ crowned with Thorns is painted on copper, a material that Teniers often used as a support as its smooth surface lent itself well to his highly finished painting technique. The exceptionally large format of this copper plate suggests that the picture was a collector’s cabinet piece – a reminder that Teniers painted for a clientele far removed from the roguish characters he so successfully depicted.