A village landscape with figures conversing in the foreground

Unusually within the oeuvre of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, this is a composition of the artist’s own invention and one of only two known variants. The other, also formerly in the Goldschmidt collection, was most recently sold in these Rooms on 8 July 2005, lot 55. That variant reproduces the figure group in the foreground, but differs in the arrangement of the background figures and includes a church instead of a manor house. It is dated 1634, Brueghel’s last known dated work before his death in 1638. Ertz dates the present work to the same period and suggests that the sparseness of the composition, together with the broken tree branch in the foreground, may represent the artist’s reflection on his own mortality (op. cit., pp. 820 and 823). Although the works also perhaps represent the artist’s furthest foray into pure landscape painting, in the present work he cannot resist including a small narrative scene in the middle ground, where a man appears to storm out of his farmhouse to be greeted by an amorous couple.

The four figures in the foreground relate to a drawing (fig. 1; Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts) historically attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Younger by L. Münz (Brueghel Drawings, London, 1961, no. A51, fig. 202), and cautiously supported by Georges Marlier (Pierre Brueghel le Jeune, Brussels, 1969, pp. 201 and 203, fig. 120). More recently, Ertz suggested that it is the work of Pieter’s brother, Jan Brueghel the Elder, and noted that the three central conversing figures of the group also appear in the lower right-hand corner of the latter’s Wedding Dance (op. cit., p. 745, fig. 580). As Ertz acknowledges, it is also possible that the drawing was based on one by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and thus likely that Pieter the Younger was using either his father’s prototype or his brother’s drawing as the basis for the present work. familiar with