|
DESCRIPTION:
|
Pieter Brueghel the Younger was born in 1564 in Antwerp as the oldest son of the famous Netherlandish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525/30-1569), and Mayken Coecke van Aelst. He was the brother of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Pieter Brueghel the Elder died in 1569, when Pieter Brueghel the Younger was only five years old. After the death of his mother in 1578, Pieter and his brother Jan Brueghel the Elder and sister Marie went to live with their grandmother, the painter Mayken Verhulst (c. 1520-1600). The family moved to Antwerp sometime after 1578. In Antwerp, Pieter Brueghel the Younger possibly entered the studio of the landscape painter Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1607). In the registers of the Guild of Saint Luke in 1584/1585, Brueghel is listed as an independent master. He married Elisabeth Goddelet in 1588 and they had seven children.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger painted landscapes, religious subjects and fantasy paintings. For this last category he often made use of fire and grotesque figures. Apart from these paintings of his own invention, Pieter Brueghel the Younger copied many works of his father by using a technique called pouncing. His genre paintings of peasants lack his father’s subtlety and humanism, and emphasize instead the picturesque. However, the present painting is not a copy after his father’s work, which makes the painting special. It can be compared in style with Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s ‘Head of an old peasant woman’ in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (See fig. 1). The face of the old peasant woman may perhaps express astonishment, terror, awe and amazement. This sharp tendency to caricature, characteristic of the father, is not found in the son to the same extent, whose portrait is less terrifying. The man in the present portrait with his casual shirt collar, simple coarse jacket and rather unkempt two-day-old beard belongs fairly certainly to the peasant class. His head, with a cap which is pulled down to the eyes, sits on a short neck on huge shoulders covered with a dark, simple peasant garment made of coarse cloth. He looks past the viewer with wide eyes and does not make eye contact with the viewer.
Purely figurative paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Younger are as rare as those by his father. When depicting the human figure, they were both concerned less with the figurative depiction of a specific person or the portrayal of one individual than with sketching a depiction of Man in general, and the characterization of human types. They were more interested in bringing out specific behaviour and its impact on physiognomy than in detailing individual features. Therefore it is unlikely that the present painting is based on a specific person.
The present portrait can be connected to the heads by Pieter Brueghel the Younger at the Brussels museum , the Musée Fabre in Montpellier (See fig. 2) and the two heads in private collections. They can be compared in the overall scale of the composition, the filling up of the available space on the roundel with the upper body cut off at the shoulders and the head more or less in the center. The dark lower foreground and background sketched in a rough, rapid, thin application of colour against which the motif stands out particularly vividly in thick and very fine brushstrokes, as well as the sharpness with which the drawing of the facial landscape is etched rather than painted. One can assume that the Brussels head was also painted on a round wooden panel, which was later trimmed into an oval shape. It cannot be stated with any certainty whether such portrait studies were preparatory sketches for paintings with multiple figures, or whether they were taken from a wider context and rose to self-sufficient themes in their own right.
The genre of the portrayal of peasant life had one more great revival in the middle of the century. One need to think only of the work of David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), or Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638), who in 1642 also brought out his own series of engravings featuring peasants’ heads based on those of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. As intermediary between the generations spanning the two centuries, Pieter Brueghel the Younger continued a great tradition of similar heads with his small, rather inconspicuous images, such as the present portrait of a peasant.
Klaus Ertz has confirmed the attribution of this painting in a certificate dated 24 October 2008.
|
Get email alerts about this artist!