River Landscape with Rainbow

At the beginning of the 1640s Teniers began to develop his own pictorial language in the genre of landscape painting. He focused his attention on the Flemish countryside as a subject itself worthy of his attention, and not merely as a backdrop to his outdoor genre scenes. In the present landscape he includes wispy, dark clouds, with streaking rays of light piercing in from various directions through rain, and a rainbow in the left background. Along with Rubens, Teniers was among the first Flemish seventeenth-century artists to include rainbows in his compositions, not for their allegorical or religious meaning, but rather as another means by which to demonstrate his careful study of nature.