Works by Pieter Brueghel the Younger
61 works · 235 ms
Pieter Brueghel the Younger ran a large Antwerp workshop that copied his father's paintings for buyers at home and abroad, and also turned out village scenes of his own design.
His father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, died in 1569, when the boy was five. In 1583 he moved to Antwerp with his brother Jan and trained under Gillis van Coninxloo, a landscape painter; by 1585 he was a master in the city's Guild of Saint Luke. Apprentices such as Frans Snyders, and many journeymen, helped with his huge output.
He copied his father's compositions by pouncing, and where he could not see an original he often worked from prints after it; some copies differ from the originals in colour or in details added and left out. The workshop made at least 25 copies of the father's Saint John the Baptist Preaching, with copies in Antwerp's Royal Museum of Fine Arts among others; in the Antwerp version a crowd in bright clothes fills a woodland clearing around the preacher. Two peasants binding faggots, of about 1620, is one of several versions in his own hand of a design that seems to preserve a lost picture by his father: two men strain to tie a bundle of sticks.
Because his style changed little after his early years, his pictures are hard to date. A round panel signed and dated 1594, I Mourn because the World is so Untrustworthy, has a small man in red, inside a globe topped with a cross, cutting the purse of a hooded old man in black. Everything below is a painting, and most are crowded with figures.
Sources: Wikipedia, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.
