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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75540 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                        PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER:
+                        A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS
+
+
+[Illustration: HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (DETAIL)]
+
+
+
+
+                             PIETER BRUEGEL
+                                THE ELDER
+
+                        A STUDY OF HIS PAINTINGS
+
+                                   BY
+
+                              VIRGIL BARKER
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                     THE ARTS PUBLISHING CORPORATION
+                                  1926
+
+
+
+
+                             COPYRIGHT, 1926
+                   BY THE ARTS PUBLISHING CORPORATION
+
+                 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....”
+
+
+                                  2.
+
+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]
+
+
+                                  3.
+
+The cause of his leaving Antwerp was his marriage, which took place
+in 1563. His choice had fallen upon the daughter of his first master,
+Pieter Coeck. Twice during his brief notice on Bruegel, Van Mander
+refers to the fact that “he had, while she was still small, often
+carried her in his arms.” Her mother, after the father’s death,
+had removed to Brussels and there successfully engaged in her own
+profession of miniature painting; in consenting to the marriage she
+“stipulated that Bruegel should leave Antwerp and settle down in
+Brussels, in order that he might efface former love-affairs from his
+eyes and his mind.” In this marriage was the beginning of what has
+been well called the Bruegel dynasty. The two sons produced copies and
+variations of their father’s paintings in such abundance that it is an
+exceptional picture gallery in Europe which does not boast its
+“_Breughel le Vieux_”; and these sons in their turn fathered a dozen
+more painters.
+
+[Illustration: THE TOWER OF BABEL. 1563. VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS. 1564. VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS (DETAIL)]
+
+[Illustration: THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS (DETAIL)]
+
+[Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE KINGS. 1564. LONDON, NATIONAL
+  GALLERY]
+
+But of them all, none approached the greatness of their original,
+whose six years of married life were filled by the creation of
+masterpieces—of realistic observation in the _Wedding Feast_ and
+the _Peasant Dance_; of sheer imagination in the _Dulle Griet_ and
+the _Triumph of Death_; of narrative power in the _Massacre of the
+Innocents_; of the purest pictorialism in the _Conversion of Paul_; of
+the indescribable _Carrying of the Cross_; of realism, imagination,
+emotion and thought merged into the large harmonies of that great
+series of five paintings, the _Months_.
+
+[Illustration: THE MISANTHROPE. 1565. NAPLES, NATIONAL MUSEUM]
+
+While he was achieving all this ordered beauty of art, the disorders of
+the life around him were increasing at a fatally rapid pace. In Ghent
+a mob sacked the Abbey of Saint Peter and, made drunk by the wine of
+its cellars and the intoxication of destructiveness, ran smashingly at
+large through the city. In Antwerp another mob totally destroyed the
+rich and famous church of _Notre Dame_. Conflicts multiplied between
+Catholics and Protestants, between civilians and soldiers; bands of
+foreign mercenaries coursed through the country and open towns. The
+Duke of Alva’s execution fires cast lurid lights upon the ruin and
+decimation of what had once been the most prosperous region of Europe.
+
+Of Bruegel’s own reactions to all this his biographer, writing at a
+time when it was almost a well-forgotten nightmare, makes no mention.
+Van Mander’s single sentence of direct characterization is this: “He
+was a very quiet and skilful man, who spoke little but was sociable
+in society, and loved to frighten his companions, often also his own
+pupils, with all kinds of goblin noises....” This does little to round
+out the portrait of Bruegel the man, for once more the emphasis is
+thrown upon that droll and amusing side of his nature which seems to
+have appealed most to his own circle and thence been transmitted to Van
+Mander. But that Bruegel was intensely aware of the tragedies about
+him is evident enough in his works. The things he saw for himself are
+set down in such pictures as the _Massacre of the Innocents_, yet with
+such an all-sufficing objectiveness that it requires an effort of mind
+to realize that that very convincingness comes from his having felt
+the tragic reality he records. But it is impossible to escape from
+the overwhelmingly personal quality of the thoughts set forth in the
+hell-mouth horrors of the _Dulle Griet_ and the apocalyptic terrors
+of the _Triumph of Death_. Moreover, Van Mander writes that Bruegel
+had made many other “inventions” which were “so satirical and mordant
+that on his death-bed he ordered them burnt by his wife, either from
+repentance or from fear that his wife would get into trouble on account
+of them.”
+
+[Illustration: THE PROVERB OF THE BIRD-NESTER. 1564–65? VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+Not many months before this happened the people of the Low Countries
+commenced their final effort of revolt which was to establish their
+freedom not until eleven years later. Bruegel left a world that was
+hardly less black than the death into which he descended with open
+eyes. At that very moment Montaigne was setting about to depict one
+entire man with a vision as veracious as that of Bruegel; Cervantes was
+soon to rival in words Bruegel’s power of making the fantastic real;
+and only forty years later Shakespeare was to accomplish a re-creation
+of human life that is more complete than Bruegel’s simply because the
+medium of literature itself permits a more comprehensive embodiment
+of the soul of man than is possible to the medium of paint. And the
+painter who more than any other kept close to life belongs in the
+company of these three.
+
+[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH. 1565 OR 1566. MADRID, PRADO]
+
+[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH (DETAIL)]
+
+
+                                  4.
+
+The subject-matter of Bruegel’s great paintings is limited only by the
+world and life.[2] The whole cycle of nature is in them—the seasons as
+they pass over mountain, plain and moving waters; the dazzling beauty
+of the southern sea, the northern cold. The entire range of human life
+is in them; somewhere in these multitudes every emotion finds its
+expressive gesture. Even all the animals that are intimately a part of
+human life are given in their degrees of individuality. These pictures
+seem to set before the eye every experience possible to man.
+
+  [2] The succeeding remarks upon Bruegel’s art and mind,
+  disregarding both the minor and the debatable works, are based
+  specifically upon the paintings which are characteristically great.
+
+Always a tale is being told, but always it is story-telling of a
+very definite kind. It is never a continuous narrative with a plot
+involving the same characters in different circumstances. Thus Bruegel
+was never obliged to arrange successive episodes of the same story
+within one frame, as the older painters had done. All the things that
+happen in his paintings could happen—do happen—just as he shows them,
+at the same time and in just the relationship to each other that he
+depicts. He always observes time unity and pulls together his wealth of
+episode and by-play through unity of theme.
+
+[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH (DETAIL)]
+
+But on a given theme, at first, he attempted to say everything than can
+be said about it. The picture in Berlin illustrates seventy proverbs;
+the _Children’s Games_ is said to contain every one of the one hundred
+and fifty-four varieties of play listed by Rabelais as the games of
+Gargantua; the _Tower of Babel_ has been called a builders’ handbook;
+the _Massacre of the Innocents_ apparently depicts every possible
+attitude of parental grief and frenzy. This exuberance of episode, this
+encyclopedic narrative utterance, had its literary counterpart in the
+book just mentioned; it was in full accord with the taste of the time,
+and Bruegel’s personal aptitude had been fostered and disciplined by
+his long succession of drawings for the plates published by Cock. For
+the paintings of this type he has thought out every possible visual
+aspect of his story-matter and swept them all into a unity of design
+not less remarkable than his unity of theme.
+
+[Illustration: THE NUMBERING AT BETHLEHEM. 1566. BRUSSELS, MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 1566? VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+The astounding thing to be noted just here is the completeness with
+which such an excessive amount of anecdote is arranged into a
+functioning organism of narrative. In the _Carrying of the Cross_ the
+movement of every one of the five hundred figures, the very expression
+of every face, is determined by a completely organized story-action.
+All the figures, even the minutest ones, play their parts in the whole
+design as such; but their momentary relations as human beings, equally
+complex, have been thought out and set down with equal thoroughness.
+Every episode is a bar, every gesture a note, in Bruegel’s orchestrated
+narrative.
+
+[Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (DETAIL)]
+
+But other paintings show that Bruegel realized the fundamental weakness
+of this—the weakness of diversity of visual motive, distraction from
+the pictorial whole. He exhibited a tendency towards the elimination
+of all side-play, towards the reduction of subject-matter to a single
+motive and a reliance upon emotional unity for the abiding impression.
+His picture-making is still story-telling in that something happens
+in terms of human action; but it is a single and casual event, and
+the main interest is shifted from events to design and color as the
+expression of mood. In the _Months_ he forgot all about narrative
+complexity for its own sake, fixed his attention on the pure pictorial
+beauty of people and of nature, and sought only the emotional meaning
+of his theme.
+
+
+                                  5.
+
+The nature of Bruegel’s work previous to taking up painting is written
+at large and in detail over his early technical habits, but in these
+also can be traced a development corresponding to the change just noted
+in subject-matter.
+
+[Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (DETAIL)]
+
+[Illustration: THE FALL OF ICARUS. BRUSSELS, MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: THE CONVERSION OF SAINT PAUL. 1567. VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+In the earlier pictures color in general is conceived somewhat as
+the worker in mosaic is compelled by his material to conceive it—as a
+weaving-together of brilliant bits of pure color into a color design
+which is itself thought out independently of other technical qualities.
+There is harmony and richness, but there is not that melting tonality
+which afterwards came to be looked upon as the last word in painting.
+Above all else, there is an unbelievable brilliancy, especially where
+Bruegel made a lavish use of vermilion. The chain of soldiers woven
+through the multitude in the _Carrying of the Cross_ is one of the most
+daring things to be found in painting; but for general sumptuousness of
+color approaching to the fusion of later times there is, outside of the
+_Months_, no equal in Bruegel’s work to the _Conversion of Paul_. And
+always it is color used for its own sake, with great sensuous delight.
+Yet always, again excepting the _Months_, it is color laid on to form
+which has already been conceived as drawing; the color, superb in
+itself, follows the form superbly; but the color and the drawing exist
+independently of one another.
+
+[Illustration: THE WINE OF SAINT MARTIN (FRAGMENT). VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+At the beginning of his painting career it was his drawing especially
+which was determined by his work for the engravers. For the masculine
+style of engraving that prevailed in his day the preparatory drawings
+had to show absolute precision of outline. The edges of everything
+had to be clean and unmistakable in order that the engraver might
+know what was intended; the artist of the first instance had to make
+it impossible for the engraver to mistake his meaning as to this
+contour or that shape. Drawing in this manner for years before he
+began to paint, Bruegel necessarily continued to do so afterwards.
+This accounts for the prevailingly silhouette character of his
+multitudes of tiny figures. Often-times, even from the beginning, the
+form that meets the eye within the shape is substantially filled out
+without being accompanied by the feeling of all-aroundness; but a full
+three-dimensional quality is more and more often attained until in the
+_Paul_, again, it fills the picture to a degree elsewhere unequalled in
+Bruegel’s work.
+
+[Illustration: THE PARABLE OF THE BLIND MEN. 1568. NAPLES, NATIONAL
+  MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE. 1567. MUNICH, ALTE PINAKOTHEK]
+
+[Illustration: THE CRIPPLES. 1568. PARIS, LOUVRE]
+
+But another consequence of his early professional training—and a
+consequence which enabled him to accomplish some of his most amazing
+feats—was his skill in composition. His training in draftsmanship
+gave him the power to render exactly all details that contribute
+to individuality of character, and the simultaneous training in
+composition taught him how to arrange immense numbers of such
+individualized figures without loss of mass unity. Was it the Alpine
+mountain-sides or merely the upper window of a house on a village
+square that suggested to him the device of a slightly elevated
+viewpoint? It is this more than anything else that enables him
+to impose upon his multitudes that order of art by which may be
+expressed the disorder of life; and it is this that gives him his long
+perspectives of village streets or far horizons dominated by oblique
+lines. These last, starkly visible at first and gradually becoming more
+broken and concealed, constitute the characteristic mark of Bruegel the
+designer.
+
+But it is in design that there is to be discerned the least amount of
+technical advance on Bruegel’s part; what he learned before he began
+to paint seems to have come nearer to sufficing him in design than in
+drawing or in color. His composition scheme in the set of the _Months_
+is shockingly, though intentionally, repetitious; in the hands of a
+less vigorous artist it must quickly have become the deadest recipe. He
+divides his panel into two practically equal parts by a bold diagonal
+from one upper corner to the opposite lower one; one of these parts
+he fills with things and people seen close at hand, and the other
+with a far-spreading panorama. And he does it five times over with
+such freshness that doing it seven times more does not seem beyond his
+powers. But the design remains a pattern, conceived in the same way as
+the large composite landscapes done soon after his return from Rome.
+
+[Illustration: THE MAGPIE ON THE GALLOWS. 1568. DARMSTADT, MUSEUM]
+
+In drawing and color, on the other hand, the _Months_ show a marked
+departure from earlier habits in the direction of an essentially modern
+practice. In the drawing as such there is an increase in looseness
+with no loss of surety; tightness is sacrificed, but not precision.
+The figures are still silhouettes to a great extent, but there is an
+approach to the coalescence of color and drawing. In color by itself
+there is ever an opposition of large areas of some shade of brown and
+some shade of green, and a weaving of these areas together by bits of
+each color in the other and of other colors in both. Though there is
+never the full impressionistic fusing of edges in atmosphere, there is
+yet a decided approximation to the vision of a genuinely naturalistic
+landscape painter, as distinguished from the vision of a draftsman or a
+miniaturist.
+
+While this is true, and must be accounted to Bruegel as a merit, an
+evidence of mental and technical growth, it is still in a measure
+unfair to the never-failing largeness and unity of vision in the
+earlier work. Whether the other qualities of this work be regarded as
+merits or defects in themselves depends, of course, upon the technical
+tenets or preferences of him who makes the judgment. But in Bruegel
+they were neither merits nor defects; they were characteristics which
+had to be present in his pictures if he painted at all. They were
+necessitated by the time in which he lived and by his professional
+practice previous to painting. They were as much a part of him as his
+fondness for telling stories; and in the fluctuations of taste stranger
+things have already happened than would be the return of even this
+latter element to professional as well as popular favor.
+
+[Illustration: WEDDING FEAST. 1568? VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: WEDDING FEAST (DETAIL)]
+
+
+                                  6.
+
+In Bruegel’s time story-telling in pictures generally was still one
+of the principal means of communicating ideas—even, perhaps mainly,
+ideas that were not inherently pictorial; prints were still the nearest
+things to books in popular circulation. Moreover, a nation living
+under the necessity of never speaking out openly on either politics
+or religion naturally resorted to symbol, the concrete proverb or the
+image that said one thing and meant another. The print of the big and
+little fish not only meant that the great oppressed the small but
+carried an idea beyond the words of the proverb in showing the big fish
+ripped up and disgorging; and upon a people so apt at interpreting
+images the significance of that would not be lost. This people could
+not only take a hearty enjoyment of the good things of life but they
+could also face the whole of it without shrinking from any part of it,
+whether of grossness or of terror. For the latter, indeed, they even
+had a gusto and the former they laughed away with a saving healthiness.
+The distinguishing mark of their living and their thinking was a robust
+realism.
+
+[Illustration: PEASANT DANCE. 1568? VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: PEASANT DANCE (DETAIL)]
+
+In Pieter Bruegel there emerged from among them a man of genius in
+complete sympathy with their realistic attitude towards life; knowing
+it from childhood, he gave it in his art a more complete expression
+than it had ever had before. The whole originality and fertility of
+his mind were for long expended upon feeding the popular taste not
+only for the familiar or exotic beauty of nature but also for a rough
+philosophy, unorganized but none the less genuine; and a habit so well
+established in him by years of labor would not vanish all at once
+even when more purely painter-like interests assumed for him a major
+importance. His predecessors in painting had been realistic in their
+measure; in them, however, realism was largely confined to details of
+execution and was more than counterbalanced by markedly idealistic
+conceptions. Even in the grotesqueries of Bosch the older disparity
+between idea and embodiment existed; the diabolism in them was only
+the obverse of the conventional religious idealism, and its distance
+from a true realism of content remained the same. When Bruegel came
+to painting, he both carried the manner of realism farther than his
+predecessors had done and informed that manner with its appropriately
+realistic matter, bringing about a new harmony between the body and the
+spirit of the art. He became the first complete realist in the history
+of painting.
+
+[Illustration: MARINE. VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+The _Fall of the Rebel Angels_ is the nearest thing to a rule-proving
+exception among Bruegel’s great works, the single one which exhibits
+any of the older disparity between container and content; and this
+picture, great as it is, could vanish without impairing in the least
+Bruegel’s essential greatness. To examine the Berlin _Proverbs_ in
+detail is to get a feeling of being among mad folks because so many
+of the sayings here illustrated turn upon outlandish actions; but as
+a picture it is a piece of masterly realistic sanity showing a whole
+village, in which some of the inhabitants happen to be crazy, intensely
+busy about its own affairs. The _Triumph of Death_, so far from being
+a piece of wild and gross fancy, is actually the lucid statement of
+an idea as true as any gesture in the picture; it is precisely the
+relentlessness of its realism in thought as well as in embodiment which
+frightens people into calling it untrue. The latter two paintings only
+show that if an artist is realist enough, if he penetrates sufficiently
+into the actual, he necessarily becomes imaginative; they only
+reiterate and strengthen Bruegel’s right to be considered the supreme
+realist in painting.
+
+[Illustration: FLEEING SHEPHERD. 1569? PHILADELPHIA, JOHNSON COLLECTION]
+
+Part of his realism is his refusal to depict what he did not feel.
+Only once did he venture upon any of the religious emotionalism that
+had played so large a part in the work of his predecessors, and then
+he found the emotion so foreign to his own feelings that he openly
+borrowed the imagery of it; in relation to the great panoramic realism
+of the _Carrying of the Cross_, the group of mourning women remains
+a mere formalism, dissociated in spirit and in manner from all about
+it. Jesus himself is simply an unfortunate creature whose approaching
+execution is the pretext for this holiday. What passes for the
+conversion of Paul might be the delusion of a man knocked in the head
+on falling from a shying horse; there is about the event none of the
+conventional supernaturalism because for Bruegel that sort of thing
+was not real. The religious subject as such disappears from his work;
+and this, coming after the ecstatic idealisms of his predecessors,
+amounts to the expression of an idea concerning the significance—or
+lack of it—inherent in the churchly religion. He will have nothing
+to do with what is not human; not even nature enters into the great
+paintings except as a setting that enhances, by sympathy or contrast,
+the emotional life of human beings. To these, whom he knows and loves,
+Bruegel gives himself wholly, to share in their sorrows and their joys.
+His religion is that of the great humanists in all ages, and his faith
+is given only to life itself.
+
+[Illustration: DARK DAY (JANUARY?). VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+[Illustration: DARK DAY (DETAIL)]
+
+Part of his realism is the robust laughter which is the only solution
+for the fix in which human beings find themselves. It is the spirit
+that animated Rabelais in describing the birth of his hero and
+Shakespeare in creating Falstaff. To come closer home to Bruegel,
+perhaps, it is the spirit of _Till Eulenspiegel_, whose gross
+pleasanteries were probably relished by the painter along with the
+rest of his generation. Bruegel’s passion for completeness in his
+realism abolishes privacy, and the state of affairs brought to pass by
+this slicing away of all walls is saved only by humor. Humor is the
+safety-valve for a spirit resolute to probe life to its last refuge—to
+probe life, but not to break through by main force, as attempted by
+later realists so-called.
+
+[Illustration: HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (FEBRUARY?). VIENNA, MUSEUM]
+
+Another element in Bruegel’s realism is the objectivity of his work.
+Van Mander’s anecdote already quoted shows that Bruegel went among
+the peasants, not as a professional artist in search of material, but
+as a participator in their life; and the great pictures themselves
+strikingly bear this out. This is not to say that Bruegel never worked
+directly from life, for there are many drawings which could not have
+been done otherwise—a team of horses resting, soldiers standing in the
+way, old market-women squatting beside their wares. But when he came to
+paint the great pictures, Bruegel worked from a memory stocked with the
+gestures and actions of people who are unconscious of being watched.
+Bruegel’s mind was centered upon their life and he was concerned with
+technic hardly beyond the point where it would enable him to crowd
+all their life into his given space and shape. His concentration upon
+the story he was telling, from the encyclopedic narrative of the
+early works to the simple and straightforward emotionalism of the
+_Months_, put him on the crest of a wave of energy which carried him
+through many an undertaking that would have been impossible for a more
+self-conscious man. We who see the pictures now are unconscious of the
+painter because he was himself lost in his subject; and because of
+this, also, we are unconscious of ourselves. “No glance ever strays
+across the footlights to the audience,” wrote Meier-Graefe of Hogarth’s
+scenes. In Bruegel’s work there are no actors, no footlights and no
+audience. There is only life and participation in life by painter and
+by us.
+
+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]
+
+
+
+
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+
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+a magazine of the art of the past. It is solely a magazine of art,
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+
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+
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+The written word, however, cannot convey all of the significance of a
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+
+                          Transcriber’s Notes:
+
+  • Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
+  • Text enclosed by pluses is in small caps (+small caps+).
+  • Blank pages have been removed.
+  • Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
+  • Errata have been applied.
+  • The name Michel Angelo has been corrected to Michelangelo
+  • The painting _A Village Wedding_ is referred to as _Village
+    Marriage_ in the NOTES.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75540 ***