Part 3

And everywhere in these pictures it is the life of Bruegel’s own time. His predecessors had clothed religious themes in contemporary dress, but the outer and the inner remained separate things; Bruegel, retaining the outer, put into it its own proper content. He ousted religious stories by contemporary stories. These he painted so completely that a thorough sociological knowledge of the age might be founded upon or tested by his pictures. The whole life of the time is set down by a hand that never falsifies, that swerves neither to the right of idealization nor to the left of caricature.

Yet to leave him as a painter of contemporary manners only would be almost as false to his greatness as to consider him only as Bruegel the Droll. For he penetrates below the temporary appearances of his time to the permanent in human nature. His pictures can be a means of access to the life of his age, to be sure; but no lover of them would think of using them in this fashion. The important thing is that they give access to a life that is of more than one age; under the costume of the time exists the same humanity that now wears another dress.

In giving himself over so unreservedly to the impermanent, Bruegel took what was for him the only way to the permanent. This cannot be captured by going out after a vague and unlocalized something called life in general; what is presented to the artist for his use is always life in particular. There is an all-life in the steady and swelling succession of human generations; but the only means of access to that is the now-life. The great artist’s major accomplishment lies in revealing the universal through the particular, the permanent through the transitory, the inevitable through the accidental.

This Bruegel does; and how well he does it is to be found by analyzing the thought behind his varied rendering of events and people. Even in his early pictures each creature has his own individuality and yet is part of the crowd, which remains a crowd in spite of all detail; each individual retains his own value of personality and yet is integrated into a collective being. Bruegel’s minute accuracy of drawing expresses his love for the individual as such; his great masses of people express his desire to see life largely and as an interwoven whole. Moreover, the device of making the ostensible subject of a picture an almost invisible incident in it is an expression of an idea as to the relative importance of the individual and what happens to him. Though the actions of the _Carrying of the Cross_ and the _Conversion of Paul_ do actually center around the subject-incident, the incident itself is reduced almost to the vanishing-point; so that the story emphasis is thrown entirely upon the larger life of which the incident is only the temporary focus. The _Fall of Icarus_ likewise expresses this heresy against conventional thinking as to what is truly sublime; only here the unimportance of a particular event is made more emphatic by such a detail as the position of the shepherd as well as by the large indifference of this great luminous calm expanse of land and sea and sky.

[Illustration: HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (DETAIL)]

[Illustration: HAYMAKING (JUNE?). RAUDNITZ, COLLECTION OF PRINCE LOBKOWITZ]

Moreover, the sequence of changes in the relative importance of the human figures in the paintings is but the story of Bruegel’s developing conception of the relative importance of man in the scheme of things. In one group of pictures the individual, though fully personalized, is a part of the crowd and the crowd a mass of insects swarming over the landscape. In another group of large-figured peasant subjects man is all-important, filling the whole and shutting nature out. The former are amazing, and one can hardly get too much of them; the latter are interesting and one likes them long. But for the final expression of his mind one must turn to the set of the _Months_; these five, with the addition of the _Paul_ and the _Icarus_, form the summit of Bruegel’s art. In them Bruegel reached the solution of the two problems of his life, the life of nature and the life of man; and the solution was the life of man in nature.

The _Months_ sum up his life’s endeavor both in the material he had all along been dealing with and in the conceptions between which all along he had been alternating. They are full of motives and incidents taken from his earlier works—the church he drew so often, children at their games, the great stretches of landscape that he loved. But all things are adjusted to one another in a new way; the people are seen neither too large nor too small, but in a perfect relationship to an immensely embracing nature; and each picture is pervaded by an unbroken harmony of mood. This set marks the attainment of final insight into everything that had concerned him; they constitute his acceptance and affirmation of life.

[Illustration: _Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art._

THE HARVESTERS (AUGUST?). NEW YORK, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART]

[Illustration: THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (NOVEMBER?). VIENNA, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: _Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art._

THE HARVESTERS (DETAIL)]

7.

The more Bruegel’s work is studied the stronger grows the feeling that almost everything may be attributed to him. To go to Vienna and through that group of fifteen pictures to come into direct contact with his mind across three hundred and fifty years is to be convinced that his is one of the inexhaustible minds of the world. The material brilliancy of the painting is more than matched by the brilliancy of the creative soul behind them. Whether he himself was conscious of all that can now be perceived in his work does not much matter; whether it came there with him aware or unaware, it is enough to make him superbly great. But this much is true: the more his mind is apprehended, the more vast and purposeful it appears.

He was fortunate in finding his means of expression in what was then a popular art; everything about that art was so alive that it drew to itself some of the greatest minds of the time. There existed a tremendous amount of give-and-take between the artist and his age, and this degree of interaction it was which had most to do with endowing both art and artist with vitality; they were fed from sources outside of and larger than themselves. Thus it was that Bruegel attained to so comprehensive an expression of himself and his age together that his work has become one of the permanent things of art.

Each picture is a completely functioning organism with several different aspects. There is the aspect of story-telling, that of technical picture-making and that of philosophic thought. Each aspect functions harmoniously with the others. Not only can one analyze out at will the elements proper to each aspect, but one can move from one to another without any feeling of shifting gear or changing speed. (The one exception is the group of mourning women in the _Carrying of the Cross_.) All these aspects function at the same mental rate. They are all interwoven into powerful wholes. Every picture is a world in itself, and coming to know them is one of the completest experiences that can be found anywhere in the art of painting.

[Illustration: THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (DETAIL)]

Yet even with this completeness of expression attained, one has before Bruegel’s work a feeling of still more behind, an immensity of mind larger than any art can be. It is the feeling one has before Michelangelo, but not before Raphael; before Shakespeare, but not before Marlowe. The greater ones are not only greater in their art, but they have something left over in themselves which their art suggests but does not directly express. Of this greater company is Pieter Bruegel.

There are purer painters, but for the purity of their art they pay the price of going without something of importance to a complete life. And even their gain in intensity seems hardly a gain in the face of Bruegel’s intensity on all the levels of his completeness. He transposes all life into his pictures in a scale of relative relationship that preserves the values of human life itself. Every other painter lacks something or has something in excess. Bruegel is the most comprehensive and the best balanced, the most energetic and the mellowest. Of all painters he is the greatest realist, and of them all the most humane.

[Illustration: THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (DETAIL)]

AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The object of the following book-list is to mention not everything that has been printed about Pieter Bruegel but only such volumes and articles as have definite value. The major cause of its shortness, however, is the fact that the literature of the subject is surprisingly small in quantity; in English, particularly, there is almost nothing beyond short paragraphs in some histories of art and the usual unilluminating brevities of general reference works.

+Pieter Bruegel l’Ancien.+ Son Oeuvre et son Temps. Par +René Van Bastelaer+ et +Georges Hulin De Loo+. Bruxelles: G. Van Oest & Cie.: 1907.

This, the first volume to be published on Bruegel, remains the standard work. For the handsomeness and completeness of its reproductions combined with the accuracy and thoroughness of its text, treating every aspect of the painter’s life and work, it is a notable accomplishment in book-making and in scholarship. What has since been written and the pictures that have since been discovered still do no more than supplement certain phases of it; nor can it be superseded until someone is prepared to give time and money to a thorough search of European galleries and private collections. It is now, however, somewhat difficult to obtain.

+Les Estampes de Peter Bruegel l’Ancien.+ Par +René Van Bastelaer+. Bruxelles: G. Van Oest & Cie.: 1908.

Within its chosen field this volume also remains the standard and needs only supplementing by later researches. Its 278 plates reproduce all the prints then thought to be by Bruegel or after his designs.

+Pierre Bruegel l’Ancien.+ Par +Charles Bernard+. Bruxelles: G. Van Oest & Cie.: 1908.

This, which appeared immediately after the two preceding volumes, may fairly be described as a good popularization of them, with additional historical material drawn from other sources. The thirty reproductions are very good half-tones; the text gives a satisfactory account of the painter’s life and times, although there is too much reliance upon the mere subject-matter of the pictures and although parts of Van Mander’s clumsy narrative are transposed into French of debatable suavity. It is the only generally available biography in French. To any reader of it my indebtedness to it for facts (other than those given by Van Mander) and my occasional difference of interpretation will be equally evident.

+Der Bauern-Bruegel.+ Von +W. Hausenstein+. München & Leipzig: R. Piper & Co.: 1910.

This is commended by Herr Friedländer (see eighth item) as a portrait of the man Bruegel; as a discussion of his work, however, it has been superseded in German by Herr Friedländer’s own book.

+“The Adoration of the Kings” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.+ By +C. J. Holmes+. In The Burlington Magazine; vol xxxviii, no. ccxv: London: February 1921.

+The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.+ By +B[ryson] B[urroughs]+. In The Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: vol. xvi, no. 5: New York: May 1921.

The fact that these two articles ostensibly deal each with a single picture should not obscure either their general interest or their significance as indications and instruments of the contemporary tendency to assign to Bruegel a higher rank than he has had heretofore.

+Von Eyck bis Bruegel.+ Studien zur Geschichte der Niederländischen Malerei. Von +Max J. Friedländer+. Berlin: Julius Bard: 1921. (Of Bruegel: p. 169 to end).

The main point of interest about Bruegel in this book is that the author gives a catalogue of paintings which differs considerably, both in its omissions and in its additions, from that given by M. Hulin (see first item).

+Pieter Bruegel.+ Von +Max J. Friedländer+. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag: 1921.

This is the standard general work in German, and contains a trustworthy translation of the entire text of Van Mander concerning Bruegel. Even those who do not read German might well possess this book for the clearness and frequent brilliancy of its 101 half-tone reproductions, the majority of which are from drawings and prints. Herr Friedländer is the only continental scholar so far whose work takes cognizance of the picture now in the Metropolitan Museum.

+Bruegel.+ Von +Kurt Pfister+. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag: 1921.

This short essay merits notice as a piece of writing. The 78 half-tone reproductions are not very clear, but they include more than a dozen which are in neither Friedländer nor Bernard.

+Pieter Bruegel.+ Vierzehn Faksimiledrucke nach Zeichnungen und Aquarellen. Mit einer Einleitung von +Kurt Pfister+. München: R. Piper & Co.: 1922.

This handsome series of large plates is a publication of the _Marées-Gesellschaft_ and for faithfulness in facsimile reproduction is not to be surpassed.

+Pieter Brueghel’s “Fall of Icarus” in the Brussels Museum.+ By +Arthur Edwin Bye+. In Art Studies: Mediæval Renaissance and Modern: No. 1. Princeton: University Press: 1923.

A sympathetic though not stylistically distinguished essay in appreciation, written around the _Fall of Icarus_ in the Brussels Museum.

+Renaissance Art.+ By +Elie Faure+. New York: Harper & Brothers: 1923. (Of Bruegel: pp. 276–286).

This author’s habitual saturation with his subject-matter has enabled him to convey the multitudinous quality to be felt in many of Bruegel’s pictures and also to adumbrate the humanity of soul behind them; but he has almost nothing to say about the more narrowly æsthetic merits which permit of Bruegel being ranked among the great; and even on the score of subject-matter Bruegel’s livingness is almost smothered under a rhetoric made sluggish with anecdotal detail.

+Breughel.+ By +Aldous Huxley+. In The Calendar of Modern Letters: vol. 1, no. 6: London: August 1925.

This essay is a little sermon on the virtue of comprehensiveness in the appreciation of art, with Bruegel as an ideal text. It is not itself a comprehensive presentation of the painter or his work and it has very few traces of the verbal brilliancy which has had so much to do with putting this author’s novels in the best-selling class; but it may make the name of Bruegel known to many who are not in a position to penetrate his work on their own account. I note a curious slip in the transposition of titles between the Brussels _Numbering at Bethlehem_ and the Vienna _Massacre of the Innocents_.

+Die Zeichnungen Pieter Bruegels.+ Von +Karl Tolnai+. München: R. Piper & Co.: 1925.

This book has immediately taken rank as the standard authority on the drawings; its 104 large half-tone plates reproduce every drawing listed in its catalogue.

+Pieter Bruegel der Aeltere.+ Siebenunddreissig Farbenlichtdrucke nach seinen Hauptwerken in Wien und eine Einführung in seine Kunst. Von +Max Dvořák+. Wien: Oesterreichischen Staatsdruckerei.

This wonderful production is just being completed; its magnificent plates embody the utmost resources of modern color-printing. An edition with the text translated into French is announced for the month of July, and another with a translation into English is expected during the year.

* * * * *

The foregoing annotations are based upon actual reading and examination of the books and articles mentioned. I think it well to append a few additional items which I have had no opportunity as yet to examine; my study of the volumes already listed, however, leads me to believe that they possess interest and importance. The words in italics at the end of each entry indicate its source among the books in the previous section.

* * * * *

+Pierre Brueghel Le Vieux.+ Par +Henri Hymans+. (Gazette des Beaux-Arts: Paris: 1890 et 1891.) _Pfister: Bibliography._

+Les Brueghel.+ Par +Emile Michel+. Paris: 1892. _Van Bastelaer & Hulin, p. 294._

+Pieter Brueghel der Aeltere und sein Kunstschaffen.+ Von +Alex L. Romdahl+. (Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, Bd. 25: Wien: 1905.) _Tolnai and Pfister: Bibliographies._

+Pieter Bruegel im Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin.+ Von +Ludwig Burchard+. (Amtliche Berichte aus der Königliche Kunstsammlung in Berlin, Bd. 34: Berlin: 1912–13.) _Tolnai: Bibliography._

+Die Niederländische Landschaftsmalerei von Patinir bis Bruegel.+ Von +Ludwig von Baldass+. (Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, Bd. 34: Wien: 1918.) _Tolnai: Bibliography._

+Der Bauern-Bruegel und das Deutsche Sprichwort.+ Von +Wilhelm Fraenger+. (München: 1923.) _Tolnai: Bibliography._

NOTES

The illustrations of Bruegel’s paintings accompanying this article are confined to those accepted as authentic by M. Hulin in his catalogue (see Bibliography, first item), with certain additional ones discovered since its publication. Seventeen of the paintings are positively dated; the rest must be distributed through the eleven years of painting on other evidence. Wherever a date appears under an illustration, it is the one assigned by the authority just mentioned, with the exceptions noted. The only alteration in the chronological order, so far as that may be determined, has been the grouping of the _Months_ at the end, to correspond with the text, in which they are treated as the summing-up of Bruegel’s work as a painter. All the drawings reproduced are dated on the authority of Herr Tolnai (see Bibliography, fourteenth item). The following paragraphs give certain supplementary facts:

_Village Marriage_: Two copies by Pieter II are known. A comparison of this picture with them shows that the arm and hand of the man kneeling near the bottom of the stairway have been repainted “for reasons of decency”!

_Dancing Peasant_: This is doubtful. Herr Friedländer considers it a copy; M. Hulin leaves the matter undetermined, but reproduces it.

_Descent of Christ into Limbo_ (drawing): Herr Tolnai says that the date and signature are apocryphal, but assigns it to no other year.

_Flemish Proverbs_: Not known to M. Hulin; date given on the authority of Herr Friedländer.

_Battle Between the Israelites and the Philistines_: also called _The Death of Saul at the Battle of Gilboa_. The uncertainty of this date turns upon whether an extra figure can or can not be discerned at the end of the Roman numerals.

_Dulle Griet_: The literal subject is the quarrelsome woman, Terrible Margaret, she who frightens the devil himself.

_The Carrying of the Cross_: Also called _The Road to Calvary_.

_The Misanthrope_: Also called _The Perfidy of the World_. The proverb lettered at the bottom is

Om dat de vverelt is soe ongetru Daer on gha ic in den ru.

The translation is: Since the world is so untrustworthy, I go in mourning.

_The Proverb of the Bird-Nester_: The proverb is

Dije den nest vveet dije vveeten: Dije rooft, dije heeten.

It may be translated: Who knows where the nest is has his knowledge; who rifles it has possession.

_The Numbering at Bethlehem_: Also called _The Payment of Tithes_.

_The Fall of Icarus_: Not catalogued by M. Hulin. Here put next to the _Paul_ in order to follow the text, in which these two are joined with the _Months_ as representing the height of Bruegel’s achievement.

_The Wine of Saint Martin_: Admitted by M. Hulin, but with strong doubts; regarded as the fragment of a larger work; done originally in tempera and repainted in oil, perhaps in the seventeenth century.

_The Magpie on the Gallows_: This picture was bequeathed by Bruegel to his wife.

_Marine_: Not dated by M. Hulin. Placed here because it appears to be unfinished, and so possibly very late.

_The Months_: The months suggested in the titles given under the illustrations follow M. Hulin’s catalogue. Herr Friedländer assigns that given as January to March, the February to December, the August (New York) to July, leaving the other two as given.

M. Hulin dates the whole set about 1567. The only trace among them of a date is on the picture in the Metropolitan Museum; on the strength of this Herr Friedländer assigns it positively to 1565, but Mr. Burroughs is inclined to agree with M. Hulin. In any case the violation of time order in placing this set last is not very great and the gain is considerable in giving a culminating impression of Bruegel’s art.

2.

No paintings in Bruegel’s manner are reproduced which are definitely or even probably by the sons. They are a multitude in themselves, and are mostly attributed to the father. They are to be met with everywhere, from London to Palermo, from Madrid to Petrograd. Herr Friedländer authenticates (without reproducing) one in Budapest and another in Csàkány. In Hampton Court Palace there is an extremely interesting smaller version of the Vienna _Massacre of the Innocents_ in which eatables are substituted for most of the children, and a companion piece of coarser workmanship giving an entirely different picture of a massacre. In Vienna there are a dozen or more by the sons which throw much light on the entire question of Bruegel’s own pictures; the most interesting of these is in the Lichtenstein Collection and is in the manner of the _Fleeing Shepherd_ in Philadelphia. The problems raised by all these pictures are many and complex, but the scope and intention of this essay did not permit of its touching upon such matters. However, there are all sorts of ways to spend life, and not the least interesting way would be to go a-Bruegeling through Europe.

+Erratum+: On page 33 the date of the _Massacre of the Innocents_ should read 1566(?) instead of 1556(?).

_The Land of Cockaigne_, reproduced on page 39, is now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

[Illustration: THE FALL OF ICARUS (DETAIL)]

[Illustration: MASTER AND PUPIL (DRAWING). ABOUT 1560–61. VIENNA, ALBERTINA]

THE ARTS

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF ART

+Forbes Watson+, _Editor_ +William Robb+, _Manager_ +Lloyd Goodrich+, _Associate Editor_ +Virgil Barker+, _European Editor_

+The Arts+ is not exclusively a magazine of modern art or exclusively a magazine of the art of the past. It is solely a magazine of art, whenever or wherever produced.

Its text is intelligent, stimulating and readable, and the essays which appear in its pages are permanent contributions to the literature of art. In selecting its writers +The Arts+ endeavors to secure those who are authorities on their particular subjects but are also capable of writing freshly and directly about them—who are not so engrossed by the historical and archæological side of art as to forget its supreme æsthetic importance.

In its essays on the art of the past +The Arts+ does not confine itself within the conventional limits of the European tradition, but recognizes in the art of the Orient, of Africa, or of aboriginal America the same qualities which exist in the art of the West.

In its treatment of contemporary art, +The Arts+ attempts to present the work of the most vital artists of the present day, whether radical or conservative, the emphasis being placed not on the particular group or faction to which the artist may belong, but upon the work itself.

Realizing that one of the most important functions of a magazine is the discovery of new talent, +The Arts+ has always opened its pages to the work of the most promising of the younger artists. Its policy is not to wait until an artist has achieved success, but to be ahead of the crowd in affording recognition to the talented men of the future.

Its regular departments, such as reviews of current exhibitions and new art books, keep its readers informed of the significant developments in the world of art. Although the bulk of its articles are devoted to painting, sculpture, architecture and the decorative arts, +The Arts+ from time to time publishes essays in the fields of music, drama or literature which it knows will be of interest to its readers—particularly on the subjects of stage design and the art of the films.