Monkey Trick

Monkey Trick of around 1650, in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, belongs to a distinct and significant category of Teniers's production: the singerie, or monkey genre, in which apes are depicted performing human activities — smoking, playing music, visiting a barber, or engaging in the social rituals of tavern life. The singerie tradition, which Teniers helped establish and which would flourish into the eighteenth century as a decorative genre, functioned on multiple levels: as comic entertainment, as satirical commentary on human behaviour (apes mimicking humans commented implicitly on the mimetic nature of social life), and as virtuoso animal observation. Teniers painted monkeys with the same attentive naturalism he brought to dogs and horses, giving his apes individual physiognomy and convincingly simian movement. The Antwerp Museum holds multiple singerie works, allowing Teniers's range within this genre to be assessed.

Canvas with warm interior setting — most singerie subjects take place indoors, appropriating the domestic or tavern settings of human genre painting. The monkeys' mobile, expressive faces are painted with careful attention to primate anatomy distinct from both human and dog physiognomy. Their hands — structurally similar to human hands — are depicted with particular care, since the manual dexterity of primates performing human tasks was central to the genre's conceit. Warm lamp or candle lighting creates the chiaroscuro interior atmosphere of a human tavern transposed to its animal parody.