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Part 1

PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER: A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS

[Illustration: HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (DETAIL)]

PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER

A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS

VIRGIL BARKER

NEW YORK THE ARTS PUBLISHING CORPORATION 1926

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

+Note+

Most of the material included in this book was originally published in a special Bruegel edition of +The Arts+. Mr. Barker’s essay met with such immediate success that in order to meet the demand the editor decided to increase the number of illustrations and publish Mr. Barker’s noteworthy essay in permanent form.

Comparatively little has been written in English on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, nothing in fact except a few passing magazine articles. At the request of the artists +The Arts+ undertook to supply this want. In selecting Mr. Barker to carry out this important work +The Arts+ was particularly fortunate. Besides being an ardent student of the genius of Bruegel, the author, in the course of his duties as European correspondent of +The Arts+, was able to carry on the special research necessary to give permanent value to the following essay.

+Forbes Watson.+

[Illustration: THE CONVERSION OF SAINT PAUL (DETAIL)]

PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER

A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS

Aside from the evidence of the signed and frequently dated prints, drawings and paintings, few things are certainly known about the life and personality of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Almost all of these, such as they are, occur in a brief passage concerning him, written about thirty years after his death, in “The Book of the Painters” by Carel Van Mander. Herein is no mention of the date of Bruegel’s birth; even the place of it, despite a seeming definiteness, remains in some obscurity. His biographer says that the painter was born “not far from Breda, in a village called Breughel,[1] by which name he called himself and left it to his descendants.” The village of that name nearest to Breda is twenty-five miles away; and as distances went in the sixteenth century, this seems hardly to be bridged by Van Mander’s easy phrase. As for the year, the guesses of the scholars range all the way from 1510 to 1530, the most widely accepted one being 1525. Any closer determination of it is a matter of comparative unimportance in its possible effect on the period of actual productiveness, since this is very satisfactorily covered by trustworthy dates.

[1] There are several different ways of spelling this name, each having some degree of authority; but so far as concerns the painter himself, the deciding fact is that the signatures now visible on the paintings (about twenty in number) consistently adhere to BRVEGEL.

And whatever the exact year may have been, it had not been long before when for Europeans the geographical world had been suddenly enlarged as a sort of materialization of the immediately preceding enlargement of mind. The succession of discoveries—of America; of India and the true Indies; of Sumatra, Java and Borneo; and, two hundred and fifty years after Marco Polo, of China—were only the working on another plane of the essentially exploring spirit which had been previously manifested by the scholars, scientists and artists of the Early Renaissance. National unity on a fresh basis had been realized in Spain through the expulsion of the Moors, and in both France and England under absolute monarchies which were headed, at the time of Bruegel’s birth, by Francis I and Henry VIII. About that time, also, Magellan was circumnavigating the globe and Cortez was conquering Mexico; Leonardo and Raphael were dying, and shortly after them went Carpaccio, Leo X and Signorelli. Martin Luther, preaching the Reformation in Germany, was thus initiating a movement of ruinous significance for Bruegel’s homeland; for there the cause of religious liberty, gradually coalescing with that of political independence, was to meet with the terrible repressions begun by the newly elected Emperor, Charles Quint, who was already by inheritance lord of the Low Countries.

During all this period of ferment and reorientation for the European mind, Antwerp, where Bruegel was to spend most of his life, was one of the most important of all ports. Situated in what was then the most densely populated region of Europe, it had in its own houses a hundred thousand persons; and of these more than a tenth were foreigners—German merchants, Italian scholars, Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, English sailors and the soldiers of Spain. Far-journeyed vessels brought to it the spices and rich stuffs, the metal-work and strange animals of distant lands; and their seamen had tales to tell of things far off towards the expanding horizons of the world. In this comfortable and prosperous city, where the sharp demarcations between classes prevalent in other countries were blurred almost into a real democracy of the bourgeois, every fresh discovery and important event had its repercussion in the general consciousness.

Antwerp was thus a natural center of activity for the religious propaganda and disputation which formed so large and so tragic an element in the life of the sixteenth century; creeds of all sorts readily found adherents among its varied and impressionable populace. Lutheranism was so strongly advocated by the convent of Augustinian monks that its inmates were dispersed, after the execution of two among them, and its buildings razed. Though the terrorism of the Inquisitor Van der Hulst and his priestly successors imposed silence on many, there were open preachings as well as clandestine meetings, and riots in which religion-frenzied women were among the boldest; and with all the burnings of the books, with all the imprisonments and the brandings, the full penalties of the imperial edicts could hardly be enforced by those who were conscious that such enforcement would destroy the principal source of the Emperor’s precarious revenue. Even the anarchy of Anabaptism, persecuted by Catholic and Protestant alike, made headway through the martyrdom of its believers; and from 1544, almost the very year when the young Pieter Bruegel commenced his apprenticeship, the new sectarianism of Calvin entered the city and grew rapidly in strength.

[Illustration: BIG FISH EAT LITTLE ONES (DRAWING). 1556. VIENNA, ALBERTINA]

While he was growing up, the English and the French were subduing the North American continent and in the Andes Pizarro was rifling the wealth of Peru; Rome was being pillaged by the Germans; Henry VIII was finally repudiating Catholicism and Ignatius of Loyola was in a way belatedly replying to Luther by organizing the Society of Jesuits; Hampton Court Palace, the French chateaux and the palaces of Venice were being built; Erasmus, Dürer, Machiavelli, Luini, Ariosto, Correggio died. As yet unconscious of such events and such personages, perhaps ignorant of the nearer deaths of Quentin Matsys and Lucas van Leyden, the youth of nameless family was living a peasant among peasants—and a genius in the making—sharing to full their laborious, roistering life. Hard drinkers and heavy eaters, they were much given to feasts and fairs; marriages, baptisms, even deaths were for them occasions for celebrations as excessive as the labor from which they thus escaped. Their animal frankness and coarse gaiety blew like a gale of rude health over all their activities. From life itself, from the small events in a remote village of the _Campine_, Bruegel absorbed the great sane grossness which now seems buried in the books of his day. Bringing with him the peasant vitality which was to develop into a lofty philosophic humaneness, he came to Antwerp and, a youth approaching his twentieth year, became an apprentice to the celebrated Pieter Coeck. Paracelsus, Copernicus and Holbein had just died; Bruegel had hardly learned to grind his colors when French Francis and English Henry followed them, even as their sometime enemy, sometime ally, Charles, was bloodily but only temporarily settling religious questions at Mühlberg.

[Illustration: THE LAST JUDGMENT (DRAWING). 1558. VIENNA, ALBERTINA]

[Illustration: A VILLAGE WEDDING. PHILADELPHIA, JOHNSON COLLECTION]

From his first master Bruegel must have received somewhat more than a merely technical training, good as that probably was. Coeck had been for four years the pupil of Bernard van Orley and had later studied in Rome; in his own work afterwards he relied to such an extent upon the formulas then worked out that all of it now seems borrowed; but the precepts that he would pass on to an apprentice could not dull or conventionalize so forceful a nature as Bruegel’s. Of more significance in the development of such a nature must have been the stories of far countries that were told, adding to his knowledge and stimulating his imagination; for Coeck had spent the year of 1533 in the Constantinople of Suleiman the Magnificent and had been one of the _entourage_ of Charles on his expedition to Tunis in 1538. Painter to the Emperor and Dean of the Guild of Saint Luke, Pieter Coeck died in 1550. Then or before Bruegel passed over to the work-shop of Jerome Cock, who was not so much a painter as a dealer in pictures and a publisher of popular prints. His establishment “was certainly the rendezvous of all the artists and all the amateurs of Antwerp and even from abroad. Rendered in engraving, the greater number of existing masterpieces would pass under the eyes of the attentive Bruegel.” (Bernard: p. 58.) The very shop-name, “At the Sign of the Four Winds,” symbolized the range of influences that played over him, the sights and tales that passed into his consciousness; and for Bruegel these things could be only so many more incitements to journey into the world and see it all for himself.

Therefore it is not surprising that, after he had completed his apprenticeship and been received into the painter’s guild, in 1551, he should set out upon his travels. Such a trip in those days was no light undertaking. All frontiers were insecure since the wars between Charles and Francis for continental domination; for little or nothing soldiers turned into robbers. Van Mander mentions neither routes nor places, writing only that Bruegel “went into France and from there into Italy.” Even the drawings now preserved afford no positive information as to the way he went—a circumstance which might be interpreted to mean that already he was interested less in telling what a specific place looked like than in rendering the emotional effect of nature upon himself. But two designs now preserved as etchings are signed and dated at Rome in 1553, and there is a drawing of the Ripa Grande which appears to have been done on the spot. The print of a naval battle engraved by Huys and published by Cock after Bruegel’s return to Antwerp indicates that he went as far south as Messina.

[Illustration: DANCING PEASANT. THE HAGUE, VAN VALKENBURG COLLECTION]

When he passed through France, François Clouet and Germain Pilon were practising their art of tepid grace; when he reached Rome, the Sistine Chapel paintings had been completed, but not the church of Saint Peter. At the height of their working powers were Michelangelo, Titian, Palestrina, Palladio; and Benvenuto Cellini was doubling in the roles of artist and bandit. There is no proof that Bruegel had any contact with these men; that he even saw their works is recorded neither in words nor in the paintings by which he lives today in their company. It is certainly reasonable, however, to suppose that the fame of his contemporaries had not only reached him but actually played a part in persuading him to his long wayfaring. Though still in his twenties, he even then had sufficiently a mind of his own to avoid the mistake of his predecessors, who had gone south specifically to copy and imitate the styles of the Italian painters. In their journeying they were following a fashion, doing something because others were doing it; Bruegel’s urge was both deeper and broader, as his genius was.

Yes, the artistic, the professional, motive must have had much to do with sending him to Italy, but the only way of expressing the sum total of the desires that undoubtedly animated him is to say that he must have craved more life.

“For to admire an’ for to see, For to be’old this world so wide”—

no motive less comprehensive than this could have moved him. He was a great artist in the making, but he was even more a man than an artist; for him the art of other men could be only a part, and not the most important part, of the all-inclusive experience of which he was in search. Only such a conception of his personality can account for the failure of the Italian masterpieces to influence him then or thereafter and his own immediate and life-long preoccupation with the entire range of nature and of human life. Moreover, so much can be inferred from Van Mander’s only other reference to this momentous trip, a reference which takes the form of reporting somebody else’s remark that “... in the Alps he swallowed all the rocks and mountains, to return home and vomit them out on painting-board and canvas....”

Towards the end of 1553, not long after the deaths of Rabelais and Lucas Cranach, Bruegel was back in Antwerp. He again became affiliated with the shop of Jerome Cock, but now as a sort of collaborator, making drawings for many plates to be engraved by others and published by the shop. As a successful business man with an eye to the market, Cock’s specialties were landscapes of all types and grotesqueries in the manner of Jerome Bosch, dead thirty-five years before, whose works were a mine of motives for exploitation. The former apprentice proved to be an even greater source of revenue and popularity for “The Four Winds”; he shared completely in the contemporary taste served by the shop and for several years devoted himself entirely to new and increasingly inventive compositions in each _genre_.

[Illustration: STUDY FOR A “BATTLE BETWEEN FAT AND LEAN.” 1558? COPENHAGEN, ROYAL COLLECTION]

The pure landscapes of this period fall into two very distinct divisions—the small, intimate ones and the large, composite ones. Among the first sort those of such obviously picturesque things as ruins are less interesting, seem less realized, than those depicting the homely commonplaces characteristic of the Low Countries. An indefinite and puddled village street, a church set among trees, the hybrid ruralness where town and country meet—the buildings and small figures rendered in a clean, unwavering line and the massed multitude of leaves given without a superfluous or unmeaning scribble—these things, conveyed with such immediacy by the free and sensitive pen-work, become sharp-edged and lose their bloom through the interposition of the engraver’s hand. Though his return gave him to see all the littlenesses about him with the freshness of a first encounter, it did not make him forget the mountains which had struck so deeply into his mind; and he composed a whole series of large, Latin-titled designs in which the far and low horizons of home were fabulously combined with Alpine steeps. In these plates, deeper than the romanticism of their composite character, is an immense and sober poetry which transpires even through the hardness of the engraving.

[Illustration: BATTLE BETWEEN CARNIVAL AND LENT. 1559. VIENNA, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: BATTLE BETWEEN CARNIVAL AND LENT (DETAIL)]

[Illustration: THE DESCENT OF CHRIST INTO LIMBO (DRAWING). 1561? VIENNA, ALBERTINA]

One print, dated the very year of his return, a composition of many people skating just outside a city wall, is obviously based on direct observation and is Bruegel’s first essay in the realistic rendering of the life of crowds which was later to play so large a part in his painting; but yet awhile the greater part of his labor went into a long succession of drolleries and diabolisms.

[Illustration: FLEMISH PROVERBS. 1559. BERLIN, KAISER FRIEDRICH MUSEUM]

[Illustration: CHILDREN’S GAMES. 1560. VIENNA, MUSEUM]

It is in connection with this part, and this part only, of his life-work that there arises any necessity of discussing the influence of another painter on Bruegel. Van Mander treats the matter thus: “He practised much in the manner of Jerome Bosch and used to make many such goblin pictures and drolleries, for which he was called by many _Pieter the Droll_.” The biographer here recorded the general contemporary estimate which, though it is now seen to fall far short of the truth, was surely natural enough, since in his own day Bruegel was popularly known by the widely circulated prints rather than by the unreproduced paintings. The _Big and Little Fish_ of 1556 is directly from Bosch, and that his spirit and his manner did have an influence upon Bruegel is not to be denied. But such influence as Bosch did exert upon the man who had returned from Italy uninfluenced was possible only because they shared in a racial streak which can be traced back of them into the Middle Ages. The quality that allowed Bruegel to be influenced by Bosch at all would have manifested itself in Bruegel’s art even if Bosch had never lived. Moreover, Bosch’s art was limited almost to this one type of subject-matter, whereas Bruegel’s art soon developed other and far more important characteristics which overshadowed without obliterating this element of grotesquerie.

[Illustration: THE FALL OF THE REBEL ANGELS. 1562. BRUSSELS, MUSEUM]

For the time being, however, it had free rein in a series of _Vices_ and numerous separate plates such as _The Ass at School_, _The Sorcerer_, _The Merchant Robbed by Monkeys_. In these prints there are, in addition, a mastery of design, an inventiveness of detail and a convincingness of outlandish imagination that far surpass Bosch’s most ambitious efforts. A little of these qualities is to be discerned in the two drawings of _The Last Judgment_ and _Christ in Limbo_; and they also display Bruegel’s entire lack of any mystical fervor, which would have imparted some sort of impressiveness to his Christs. This negative trait in Bruegel, which is the exact obverse of the sort of humaneness which made him great, is further shown in the series of _Virtues_, also of this period; although these occasionally exhibit a high degree of skill in handling complex groupings, they are what professionalized virtues are apt to be—tedious.

[Illustration: BATTLE BETWEEN THE ISRAELITES AND THE PHILISTINES. 1562 OR 1563. VIENNA, MUSEUM]

Midway in this prosperous and fertile time of development the Emperor Charles, taken with the notion of enjoying all the benefits of being dead while yet alive, partitioned the empire between his brother and his son, and himself retired in state to a monastery in Spain. From this haven, free of governmental responsibilities, he was able, through his dutiful son Philip, to instigate increasingly severe measures of religious and political repression for the people of the northern lowlands. Yet such things did not affect the personal liberty of Bruegel, who was maintaining an irregular establishment described by Van Mander in the following anecdote: “As long as he lived in Antwerp, he kept house with a servant-girl, whom he might have married had it not misfortuned him that she was always telling lies, a thing repugnant to his love of truth. He made an agreement or contract with her that he should mark all her lies on a stick—and he took a pretty long one—and when the stick should be full of marks the marriage should be off; which then happened before much time had passed.”

[Illustration: HEAD OF AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN. 1564? MUNICH. ALTE PINAKOTHEK]

More important is what Van Mander tells us of a friendship: “He worked much for a merchant named Hans Frankert, an admirable and excellent man, who found pleasure in knowing Bruegel and was with him whole days at a time. With this man Frankert, Bruegel often went among the peasants, to fairs and marriages, both dressed like peasants; and they took presents like the others, just as if they belonged to the family or acquaintance of the bride or the bridegroom. Here Bruegel found his pleasure in observing the manners of the peasants in eating, drinking, dancing, jumping, loving and other fun-making; which things he then very skilfully and carefully rendered again in colors, in water-color as well as in oil, in both which mediums he was extraordinarily talented.” Then Van Mander proceeds to stress the faithfulness and accuracy of Bruegel’s peasant pictures in the details of costumes and movements. In short, Bruegel had begun to paint.

The earliest dated painting, _Twelve Flemish Proverbs_, is interesting only because of its connection with Bruegel; its relative clumsiness of execution and utterly unpictorial conception as a whole render it very likely the first of his attempts in a new medium. However, this picture and the others that must be grouped immediately with it mark the definite emergence of what was thenceforward to be his predominant interest—the life of the peasants, between whom and himself there existed the unbreakable bonds of a common origin and a common destiny. Thus he began at once to paint in accordance with the dictates of his essentially realistic genius, but the first works of capital importance still retain a large admixture of the fantastic spirit which had been running riot in his recent designs for the engravings. These two pictures are the _Carnival and Lent_ and the _Flemish Proverbs_ in Berlin, both of the year 1559; in both fantasy is made convincing through realistic treatment, just as the Van Eycks and Roger Van der Weyden had made convincing their religious idealism, Bruegel’s difference from them being simply a difference of subject-matter and a still greater reliance upon realistic skill for its own sake. In the _Children’s Games_ of the next year there occurs the first complete union on a great scale of realism in both matter and manner; and two years later, with the _Fall of the Rebel Angels_, a recurrence in greatly intensified form of the combination between fantastic idea and realistic treatment. This last painting, credited to Jerome Bosch himself until the discovery of Bruegel’s signature, is infinitely superior in conception and execution to anything by the earlier man, and would alone rank its creator as a great painter; yet the greatness it confers upon its maker is not the kind that is most truly Bruegel’s. Through all these paintings of the Antwerp period there runs a rapidly increasing technical skill—in drawing, color and design—until the last picture that could possibly have been done before his removal to Brussels, the _Israelites and Philistines_, is for minute workmanship a world’s wonder. On a small panel about thirteen by twenty-two inches Bruegel has put several hundred human beings, the largest of whom is less than two and one-half inches, in a landscape setting of great beauty, all done in such detail that one can count the spots on the giraffes far away across the river—and all seen with so careful a regard for values and design that it is a satisfactory picture from whatever distance it is regarded, its details merging into the larger relations as one views it from further off. Craftsmanship of this type in painting can go no farther.

[Illustration: “DULLE GRIET.” 1564. ANTWERP, VAN DEN BERGH COLLECTION]