More than anything else, Alchemist Heating a Pot conveys the sense that alchemy–itself part chemistry, part speculative philosophy–is a science that is unequivocally and completely dependent on its instruments. The old man is surrounded by a variety of instruments–glass jars and flasks are artfully arranged on his shelves, ceramic containers are strewn throughout his workshop, a pair of tongs leans up against the desk, and a clay crucible sits on on a small stool. In Teniers’ best-known painting, Alchemist Heating a Pot, an elderly alchemist anxiously leans forward, carefully handling a small bellows, fanning oxygen into a small fire under a ceramic vessel.
All of Teniers’ alchemical scenes, however, show the alchemist’s workshop as a place of experimentation and inquiry–a space full of instruments integral to the experiments, tools that were built and maintained through a plethora of different technologies. Over the course of his career, Teniers painted some 350 different scenes, illustrating just about every aspect of alchemy imaginable. David Teniers the Younger, a seventeenth-century Flemish painter, had a serious thing for alchemy.
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