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Lot Essay
This Visit to the Farm is one of the finest examples of a comparatively scarce composition within the oeuvre of Pieter Brueghel the Younger. This scene depicts a well-to-do couple, presumably landlords visiting their tenants on the occasion of the birth of their third child. The wife, dressed in black at right, opens her coin purse before a young boy dressed in a simple white shirt while her husband engages with a man further in the interior. Because the farm interior is unusually well-appointed and the villagers so industrious, it is unlikely that Brueghel intended any sort of social critique in which the rustic dwellers’ mean state would be taken as a cipher for their moral inferiority.
Described as a ‘[b]on exemplaire’ by Georges Marlier (op. cit.), this picture belongs to a group of around sixteen examples that Klaus Ertz considered to be autograph or likely autograph works, some of which he knew only from images of varying quality (op. cit., 1988⁄1990; Ertz conflated the provenance of this painting with another work offered for sale in Paris in 1986, erroneously viewing them as one and the same). Dated examples are known between the years 1611 and 1635 (at the time of publication, Ertz, op. cit., 1988⁄1990, questioned the date of 1611 inscribed on his no. E462, though the date was read as such when it subsequently sold at Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 2008, lot 17).
The composition is unusual within the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger in that no definitive prototype by the artist’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is known. Klaus Ertz has, however, suggested that the grisaille in the collection of the Fondation Custodia, Paris, may possibly be the work of the elder artist (see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625): Kritischer Katalog der Gemälde, III, Lingen, 2008-2010, pp. 1244, 1247, fig. 575⁄1). A further grisaille by Pieter the Younger's brother, Jan Brueghel the Elder, is in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (inv. no. 645), while a replica in colour and datable to circa 1597 is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1). Jan’s colour replica probably served as the direct model for all subsequent versions by the younger Brueghel and his workshop.
The subject enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Southern Lowlands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In addition to the Brueghel family, Marten van Cleve depicted it on several occasions, as did artists in his circle, with a particularly fine signed and dated example by van Cleve from 1572 in the collection of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (inv. no. 1931).
Described as a ‘[b]on exemplaire’ by Georges Marlier (op. cit.), this picture belongs to a group of around sixteen examples that Klaus Ertz considered to be autograph or likely autograph works, some of which he knew only from images of varying quality (op. cit., 1988⁄1990; Ertz conflated the provenance of this painting with another work offered for sale in Paris in 1986, erroneously viewing them as one and the same). Dated examples are known between the years 1611 and 1635 (at the time of publication, Ertz, op. cit., 1988⁄1990, questioned the date of 1611 inscribed on his no. E462, though the date was read as such when it subsequently sold at Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 2008, lot 17).
The composition is unusual within the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger in that no definitive prototype by the artist’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is known. Klaus Ertz has, however, suggested that the grisaille in the collection of the Fondation Custodia, Paris, may possibly be the work of the elder artist (see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625): Kritischer Katalog der Gemälde, III, Lingen, 2008-2010, pp. 1244, 1247, fig. 575⁄1). A further grisaille by Pieter the Younger's brother, Jan Brueghel the Elder, is in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (inv. no. 645), while a replica in colour and datable to circa 1597 is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1). Jan’s colour replica probably served as the direct model for all subsequent versions by the younger Brueghel and his workshop.
The subject enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Southern Lowlands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In addition to the Brueghel family, Marten van Cleve depicted it on several occasions, as did artists in his circle, with a particularly fine signed and dated example by van Cleve from 1572 in the collection of the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (inv. no. 1931).