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Lot Essay
The moniker of this iconic scene comes from the small yet distinctive motif of the bird trap, visible in the snowy riverbank on the right- hand side of the composition, which is dominated by a wintry tableau of townsfolk skating and playing on a frozen river lined with village houses and a church. Synonymous with the Brueghel family, the composition was enormously popular and was copied more than 100 times by members of their studio and followers. Versions by Pieter Brueghel II are plentiful, and while the present lot is considered a workshop replica by Liedtke (op. cit.), it is numbered among the autograph versions in Klaus Ertz's catalogue raisonné (see K. Ertz, op. cit., II, p. 618. no. E712).
The picture has been variously interpreted. On the one hand, it can be described as a simple landscape, and was certainly based on Brueghel's contemporary surroundings; in the catalogue of the exhibition Le Siècle de Brueghel (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, 1963, p. 69), Georges Marlier identified the village depicted as Pède-Ste-Anne in Brabant. Yet more weighty interpretations are also possible: a later inscription on a print by Frans Huys (1522-1562) after Pieter I of Ice skating before the gate of St. George likens the impermanence of life to that of ice (F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish engravings, and woodcuts, c. 1450-1700, Amsterdam, 1949-, IX, no. 28). Accordingly, in the present work the obliviousness of the birds toward the threat of the trap may be equated with the carefree play of the skaters upon the fragile ice.
Pieter Brueghel II made a career of mining the compositions of his father, Pieter Bruegel I, developing a large and active workshop that produced numerous village scenes such as the present work. While it resembles Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Hunters in the Snow of 1565 now in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, the specific model for the present composition was long thought to be a painting in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (inv. no. 8724) that bears the signature of Pieter I. In recent years, however, this attribution has been challenged, thus suggesting that the prototype for The Birdtrap may in fact be lost (see P. van den Brink, ed., Brueghel Enterprises, Maastricht, Brussels and Ghent, 2002, pp. 160-161 and Ertz, op. cit., p. 576).
The picture has been variously interpreted. On the one hand, it can be described as a simple landscape, and was certainly based on Brueghel's contemporary surroundings; in the catalogue of the exhibition Le Siècle de Brueghel (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, 1963, p. 69), Georges Marlier identified the village depicted as Pède-Ste-Anne in Brabant. Yet more weighty interpretations are also possible: a later inscription on a print by Frans Huys (1522-1562) after Pieter I of Ice skating before the gate of St. George likens the impermanence of life to that of ice (F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish engravings, and woodcuts, c. 1450-1700, Amsterdam, 1949-, IX, no. 28). Accordingly, in the present work the obliviousness of the birds toward the threat of the trap may be equated with the carefree play of the skaters upon the fragile ice.
Pieter Brueghel II made a career of mining the compositions of his father, Pieter Bruegel I, developing a large and active workshop that produced numerous village scenes such as the present work. While it resembles Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Hunters in the Snow of 1565 now in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, the specific model for the present composition was long thought to be a painting in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (inv. no. 8724) that bears the signature of Pieter I. In recent years, however, this attribution has been challenged, thus suggesting that the prototype for The Birdtrap may in fact be lost (see P. van den Brink, ed., Brueghel Enterprises, Maastricht, Brussels and Ghent, 2002, pp. 160-161 and Ertz, op. cit., p. 576).