Bruegels and Brueghels

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The Brueg[h]el Phenomenon. Paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger with a Special Focus on Technique and Copying Practice

By Christina Currie and Dominique Allart

This lavish, three-volume gift box is only for specialists, but it is a milestone of patient, persistent visual research.  Under the sponsorship of the Belgian Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, two scholars have devoted themselves to investigating the painting technique of two generations of the Bruegel dynasty, mid-16th-century founder Pieter the Elder and his 17th-century copyist son, Pieter the Younger. 

Over a decade ago a progress report on selected works and copies in Belgian museums appeared as an exhibition, ‘Brueghel Enterprises’ (Brussels–Maastricht 2001), edited by Peter van den Brink but with contributions from Christina Currie and Dominique Allart.  Allart is an art history professor at the University of Liège; Currie is a conservator at the Royal Institute for Cultural Patrimony who specializes in technical examination of artworks.  The resulting tomes testify to their fruitful collaboration, which will be a lasting monument that every Bruegel scholar must find foundational.

Volume 1 introduces the two artists before delving into four case studies of major works by Bruegel the Elder: the Census at Bethlehem (1566; Brussels); the Sermon of John the Baptist (1566; Budapest); Winter Landscape with Bird Trap (1565; Brussels), and the Adoration of the Magi (redated 1563 instead of 1567; Winterthur, Dr Oskar Reinhart Coll.).  All but the Budapest panel were already published in the 2001 exhibition catalogue, with copies. 

For each work, careful documentation recorded provenance, inscriptions, painting support, preparatory layers, underdrawing, and paint layer qualities, including condition, palette, and brushwork.  From those investigations comes a reassessment of Bruegel the Elder's painting technique.

Volume  2 recapitulates the same topics for ten copies after his father by Brueghel the Younger, including copies after the above-mentioned pictures, but also other original works: the Battle between Carnival and Lent; Magpie on the Gallows; Wedding Dance in the Open Air (lost original); Crucifixion (lost original); Massacre of the Innocents (after a lost Maerten van Cleve); and Peasant Lawyer (lost model by an anonymous painter). 

Conclusions about Brueghel the Younger's practices in his large workshop begin Volume 3, followed by an attempt to isolate the authentic works or 'core group' by the master, on the basis of his underdrawings and painted surfaces. Finally, a set of appendices charts inscriptions and copying techniques, underdrawing media, and the dendrochronology of panels used by Pieter the Younger, all of them used to provide his core group of underdrawings and paintings.  In the process, the authors deduce that Brueghel the Younger used a corpus of compositional drawings and cartoons (now lost) that his father made for figure groups and transferred to his panels using ‘pouncing’, a dusting of outlines derived from Italian workshop practice for frescoes.

A most useful section in Volume 3 charts both extant and lost original works by Pieter the Elder that served as models for his son Pieter the Younger, including some variations.  These works must be distinguished from what Hans van Miegroet called 'phantom copies,' i.e. paintings that suggest resemblance to lost originals but actually constitute novel inventions in the manner of the older painter. 

startling new finding from technical examination has already been noted by the scholarly community: the Fall of Icarus (Brussels), universally considered an original by Bruegel the Elder (if gravely damaged) and surviving in a later, second version, is now judged to be a work produced after the lifetime of Bruegel the Elder, if still based on a lost original.

Still missing from Bruegel studies is any examination of his several surviving yet damaged and faded canvas pictures, even though one of them is in Brussels (Adoration of the Magi) two are in Naples, and a recent rediscovery, the Feast of St Martin, is in Madrid.  To cavil amidst this abundance, however, seems churlish.  Nineteen museums contributed their pictures to this foundational study, providing high resolution photographs, infrared reflectograms, and x-radiographs as evidence of Bruegel’s artistic techniques, including his sequence of painting. 

This project achieves its ambitious goals: to characterize Bruegel the Elder’s painting technique and lost graphic material and to survey the copying procedures of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who extended his father’s sought-after compositions into the 17th century and even to the present, where his works now command lofty auction prices despite their inferior execution.  Its boxed three volumes provide a weighty reference – the gift that keeps on giving– for any future Bruegel (and Brueghel) appreciation.

The Brueg[h]el Phenomenon. Paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger with a Special Focus on Technique and Copying Practice  by Christina Currie and Dominique Allart is published by Brussels Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, 2012, 3 volumes, 1059 pp., 667 illus. ISBN 978-2-930054-14-8