Brueghel Junior: Burnt umber and black eyes
Everyone enjoys a good punch-up now and again, as long as it’s somebody else who’s getting punched, and so it was in early-17th-century Belgium when Pieter Brueghel the Younger evidently sought to keep a family tradition alive by painting “The Peasants’ Brawl”. It was Pieter’s birthday on May 22 and we took him to the village fete for some fun.
Anthonis van Dyck’s portrait of the Younger Pieter
It’s believed the villagers got into a rumble over a card game during the local knees-up, perhaps a celebration of the kermesse of St George. The what? Not being a follower of the Brueghels, nor a European, nor a Christian liturgist, I had to look it up. Wikipedia asked whether I meant the bicycle race, the Canadian rock band, a cubist painting by Wyndham Lewis or the festival.
I picked the last, and Wiki explained that a kermesse or kermis is a fun fair, originally held to mark the anniversary of church or parish’s founding, the name coming from the Dutch kerk for church and mis for mass. Such parties are still common in the Low Countries and northern France.
Meanwhile the online art-print emporia are falling all over one another trying to sell not one but two paintings of the St George kermisse by Brueghel Junior, “Kermesse with Theatre and Procession” and “The Kermesse of St George” from 1628, a detail of which is shown here. It looks like a rural re-enactment of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, with a chicken in the foreground having a lovely meal.
Just down the road from the Brueghels, the David Teniers Elder and Younger were also getting the fairs on canvas. Below is “Flemish Kermess” by Teniers the lad from 1652, full and in detail, and it’s certainly a more subdued gathering than the one the Brueghel boy attended, though not without its amusing notes, and surely that’s Rembrandt scowling at the official photographer?
Sotheby’s dug “The Peasants’ Brawl”, an early version of reality TV, out of a Belgian private collection for its “Old Master Paintings” sale on June 5 in New York. It was expecting between $80,000 and $120,000 for it, and why not? Must be lots of wrestling fans with the cash, and it would look great in any bar too.
The auction house cites art historians Georges Marlier and Gustave Gluck in suggesting that Pieter the Younger (c.1564-c.1637), who built a career on copying his dad, was here copying both the old man’s compositional genius and his flair with a fistfight, since there once existed a work of the same title by the Elder, merely glimpsed now in a print by Lucas Vorsterman, who used to copy Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Vorsterman acknowledged the debt, of course — even then there was regard for intellectual property.
The Younger would have found the peasant set-to particularly endearing. His nickname was “Hell Brueghel” because he liked nothing better than infernal flames and leering grotesques.
Dad was known as “Peasant Brueghel”, but most kids think of their parents that way. Pieter’s brother Jan the Elder was “Velvet Brueghel”, and his sister Marie was “Doesn’t Know How to Paint Brueghel”. Their grandmother did, though, and probably taught the boys where to put the blue and where to put the green. (Jan’s daughter Anna married Tenniers the Younger — Belgium is a small country.)
Pieter did landscapes and religious subjects of his own devising, but mostly copied from his father’s catalogue, always giving them a little hellish oomph. Subtlety was not for his generation, and things certainly got a lot more surreal.
