Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The modern reference catalogue, Manfred Sellink's 'Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints' (2007), treats about forty paintings as autograph. Sixty-one drawings have been accepted since Hans Mielke's 1996 catalogue raisonne removed a substantial group of earlier attributions, and Bruegel designed roughly forty further compositions that survive only as prints, made for engravers to cut and Hieronymus Cock's press to publish. Twelve of the accepted paintings, more than in any other single collection, are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Those numbers describe what can be checked, not what once existed. Martin Royalton-Kisch has estimated that the surviving drawings represent only about one percent of Bruegel's total original output on paper. Whatever proportion held for paintings and prints, the working assumption behind every count in this record is that most of what Bruegel made is simply gone, and there is no way now to know what it looked like.

For three centuries the standard account, following Karel van Mander's 1604 biography, held that Bruegel dressed as a peasant to attend village weddings and fairs incognito, sketching the guests from the inside as one of them. Gustav Gluck's study of 1910 dismantled the story, and Arthur Popham's 1931 publication of Abraham Ortelius's eulogy for Bruegel, ending 'Ortelius dedicated this with grief to the memory of his friend', confirmed a different picture: a man Ortelius called mediocriter literati, moderately lettered, moving in a circle of humanists, merchants and cultured collectors in Antwerp and Brussels.

The documented owners of his paintings support the correction. Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a wealthy Antwerp merchant, owned sixteen; Jean Noirot, master of the Antwerp mint, owned five, including the Peasant Wedding, which hung in his own dining room; Ortelius himself commissioned a grisaille; the Antwerp banker Niclaes Cornelius Cheeus owned the Twelve Proverbs; Cardinal Granvelle, archbishop of Malines, owned several more. Peasant subjects were bought by bankers and mint masters to hang in the best rooms of their town houses, for a sophisticated audience that read them as commentary on folly and the human condition, not as ethnography from the inside.

The first secure documentary trace of Bruegel is from 1550, at Mechelen, where he collaborated with the painter Peeter Baltens on a lost altarpiece for the city's Glovemakers' Guild. He joined Antwerp's Guild of St Luke as a free master before October 1551 or in 1552; the register enters him as 'Peeter Brueghels, schilder'. Van Mander's claim that he trained under Pieter Coecke van Aelst has no strong stylistic support, though a transcription of Coecke's own lost epitaph names a disciple, 'Peter Bruegel the painter, to whom he gave his daughter in marriage' - evidence for the marriage, not conclusive proof of the apprenticeship.

He then travelled to Italy, reaching Rome by about 1553, where he worked alongside the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, and as far south as Reggio Calabria. By 1556 he was back in Antwerp and working for the print publisher Hieronymus Cock, supplying drawings to be engraved. His first dated paintings do not appear until 1557; for the first years of his independent career, Bruegel's public reputation was built entirely on prints designed for someone else's press, not on paintings at all.

Cock had founded his publishing house, Aux Quatre Vents, in Antwerp around 1548, and between 1555 and 1557 he issued thirteen Bruegel landscape engravings under Bruegel's own name alongside forty-six prints attributed to Hieronymus Bosch, who had died in 1516. In 1557 Cock published an engraving after a Bruegel drawing of 1556, 'The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish', cut by Pieter van der Heyden - and credited the invention to Bosch rather than to the living artist who had actually drawn it. Bosch's name still carried more weight in the market than Bruegel's did.

The attribution did not stay fixed. When the plate was reprinted in 1619 by the Amsterdam publisher Claes Jansz. Visscher, Bruegel's own name replaced Bosch's - a reversal that only makes sense if, by then, a design once considered more saleable as Bosch's had become more saleable as Bruegel's. The original drawing, signed and dated by Bruegel in 1556, survives in the Albertina, Vienna, and settles the question the print itself was built to obscure.

In 1563 Bruegel married Mayken Coecke, daughter of Pieter Coecke van Aelst and the miniaturist and watercolourist Mayken Verhulst, and moved to Brussels, where he lived for the rest of his short life. Nearly all of the paintings on which his modern reputation rests date from the six years between the marriage and his death in 1569: the Tower of Babel and the Months series, of which the Hunters in the Snow is the best known survivor, both from 1565; the Peasant Wedding and the Fight Between Carnival and Lent; the Triumph of Death; and the Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559, painted just before the move.

He had two sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, born 1564, and Jan Brueghel the Elder, born 1568, both of whom became painters. Bruegel died before either was old enough to be trained by him directly, a fact that matters for everything that follows about how their father's compositions were later copied.

An Antwerp city document dated 21 February 1566 (new style) records Nicolaes Jonghelinck pledging his art collection as collateral against a tax debt owed by Daniel de Bruyne; the document lists 'sixteen pieces by Bruegel', including the Tower of Babel, the Carrying of the Cross and the Months, all decorating Jonghelinck's villa outside the Antwerp walls. When de Bruyne defaulted, the city seized the paintings; where they were held for the next twenty-eight years is not documented in the sources consulted. The city of Antwerp gave them to Archduke Ernst, the incoming Habsburg governor of the Netherlands, only in 1594, the year of his arrival, and his secretary Blasius Hutter catalogued them; Ernst's heir, Emperor Rudolf II, inherited the group, which became the core of the Kunsthistorisches Museum's Bruegel holdings. The provenance of three of the museum's most famous paintings therefore has one real, undocumented gap - 1566 to 1594 - bridged here by naming it rather than smoothing over it, before running without further gaps from Ernst's 1594 gift to a public collection today.

Jean Noirot, master of the Antwerp mint from 1562 to 1572, owned five Bruegels according to his own 1572 inventory, including the Peasant Wedding, hung in his rear dining room. Abraham Ortelius, the cartographer, was very probably the first owner of Bruegel's grisaille 'The Death of the Virgin': a 1578 letter from Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert to Ortelius, thanking him for an engraved copy, reads 'Bruegel and Philips have surpassed themselves. Neither of them, methinks, could have done better. Their friend Abraham Ortelius's favour has spurred on their natural talents.' Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, archbishop of Malines, owned several more.

Since 2012 the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, with Getty Foundation funding, has run the Inside Bruegel research project: infrared reflectography and X-radiography of its twelve panels to read underdrawing and pentimenti, X-ray fluorescence to identify pigments, and dendrochronology to date the wood itself. The technical work has changed compositions understood as fixed - infrared imaging showed that in one painting a foreground hunter was added only after the snow and tree trunk around him had already been painted, a change made when the picture was already far advanced.

Dendrochronology has also demoted a painting once shown as autograph. A version of the Massacre of the Innocents was dated by the growth rings of its panel: the tree could not have been felled before 1569, and allowing for the sapwood normally removed and the seasoning time normally required, the panel cannot be earlier than about 1594 - a quarter of a century after Bruegel's death. The picture is now understood to be the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger's workshop, not the father's. The autograph original is in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court, its status confirmed independently by a conservator's discovery of faint remnants of a signature. That original had itself been altered: between 1604 and 1621 an unknown hand painted over the bodies of the murdered infants, turning them into bundles, geese and animals, a change only recovered by later infrared imaging that revealed the massacre Bruegel had actually painted underneath.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger ran a workshop that produced painted copies of his father's most popular compositions for decades after 1569, on a scale that has to be stated in hundreds rather than in individual pictures. Klaus Ertz's 2000 catalogue of the younger Brueghel records 127 surviving versions of the Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap alone: forty-five he accepts as autograph works of Pieter the Younger himself, fifty-one he marks as doubtful, and thirty-one he rejects outright as neither father's nor son's. At least thirteen faithful copies of the Massacre of the Innocents are separately recorded. Christa Currie and Dominique Allart's three-volume technical study, 'The Brueg(H)el Phenomenon' (2012), reconstructs how the son's shop actually worked: copies were produced to commission, using patterns and tracings taken from the father's originals, and the workshop's practices are now understood well enough to be diagnostic in their own right.

This has a direct practical consequence for anyone trying to understand the market for 'Bruegel'. A painting catalogued as Pieter Brueghel the Younger is not a lesser version of a Bruegel the Elder; it is a different, if related, category of object, made after the father's death by an artist working in his own right, and it should never be read as evidence for what the father's paintings are worth.

Beyond Cock's commercial relabelling of the Big Fish print, deliberate forgery of Bruegel's name began within a generation of his death. A group of pen-and-ink landscape drawings carries false Bruegel signatures and dates in the early 1560s; watermark analysis of the paper showed it could not have been manufactured before the 1590s, decades after Bruegel died, exposing the sheets as the work of the printmaker Jacob Savery. Hans Mielke's 1996 catalogue raisonne of the drawings removed these and other spurious attributions, which is why the accepted total stands at sixty-one rather than higher.

The dendrochronological demotion of the Kunsthistorisches Museum's Massacre of the Innocents, described above, is not usually filed alongside these cases because nobody set out to deceive: the picture had been catalogued in good faith as at least studio work for three and a half centuries before tree-ring science could test it. It belongs in the same discussion anyway, because the practical effect - a painting long shown as Bruegel's, now known not to be - is identical.

The Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559 depicts, by the most widely cited modern count, upward of a hundred distinct Dutch proverbs and idioms staged as literal actions in a single village scene; because more than one proverb can sometimes be read into the same figure, and because language change has obscured others, no two scholarly counts agree exactly, and none should be treated as final. The picture's earlier titles, 'The Blue Cloak' and 'The Folly of the World', describe its actual subject more precisely than the modern one does: this is a catalogue of human folly, not an illustrated dictionary.

That kind of moralising, proverb-based invention did not come from nowhere. Antwerp's leading chamber of rhetoricians, the Violieren, had merged with the city's Guild of St Luke, the painters' guild Bruegel joined in 1551, as early as 1480; painters and rhetoricians shared the same civic institution and, on Walter Gibson's argument, the same intellectual culture of proverb, allegory and moral wordplay that Bruegel's paintings put on panel. This is Gibson's documented argument, not Bruegel's own stated intention, which is nowhere recorded; no letter, inventory note or contract explains what the painter himself believed the picture meant, and none should be invented to fill that gap.

Three years after Bruegel's death, Provost Maximilien Morillon wrote to Cardinal Granvelle, who was trying to recover paintings looted from his palace at Mechelen, that Bruegel's works had become rarer and more expensive than ever and that Granvelle should not count on finding any more except at a very high price. The market has stayed in essentially that condition for four and a half centuries. Of the roughly forty accepted paintings, nearly all are in museum collections, and the great majority arrived there generations ago.

The one clear exception in living memory is a small painted roundel, 'The Drunkard pushed into the Pigsty', known since 1975 only from an old engraving and confirmed as an autograph Bruegel panel by Roger van Schoute and Helene Verougstraete in the Burlington Magazine in March 2000, following its rediscovery. Lent to the National Gallery, London, for the 2000-2001 exhibition season, it was sold at Christie's, London, on 10 July 2002 (sale 6604, lot 37) against an estimate of GBP 3,000,000 to GBP 4,000,000; the price realised, hammer plus buyer's premium as Christie's records it without separating the two figures, was GBP 3,306,650. Christie's own catalogue does not publish the hammer price alone, so this record states the combined figure and says so rather than guessing at a split.

Set against that single sale, painted copies by Pieter Brueghel the Younger circulate freely and are not rare: versions of his father's Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap have made $2.3 million at Sotheby's New York in January 2014 and GBP 3.4 million at Sotheby's London in July 2014, again without a published hammer and premium split in the sources consulted. Those are healthy prices for a workshop copyist working two generations after the original, and they say nothing at all about what the father's own paintings would fetch, because his own paintings simply do not come up.

Bruegel died in Brussels on 9 September 1569. His son Jan Brueghel the Elder later erected a funerary monument at Notre-Dame de la Chapelle recording the year of death in Roman numerals as MDLXIX, 1569. A separate posthumous engraved portrait of Bruegel, published in 1572 in the print series 'Pictorum Aliquot Celebrium Germaniae Inferioris Effigies', is inscribed 'Obiit Bruxellis anno 1570' - died in Brussels in the year 1570. The discrepancy between a son's own funerary inscription and a publisher's engraved caption three years after the death is recorded here as exactly that: unresolved in the sources consulted, and worth a specialist's attention rather than a guess.

Abraham Ortelius wrote his eulogy for Bruegel in his Album Amicorum around 1573, calling him 'the most perfect painter of his century'. That judgment did not immediately settle into consensus. Giorgio Vasari and, at greater length, Karel van Mander framed Bruegel chiefly as a comic successor to Hieronymus Bosch, a reading that outlasted the artist by centuries. His current reputation, built substantially on the winter landscapes once good colour reproduction could circulate them widely, is a twentieth-century development as much as a sixteenth-century one.