Renaissance
Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638)
Flemish Northern Renaissance painter.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638) was a Flemish painter, the eldest son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and grandson, through his mother Mayken Coecke van Aelst, of the painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst and the artist and print-publisher Mayken Verhulst. His father died in 1569, when Pieter was only five, and after his mother's death in 1578 he and his siblings were raised in Brussels by their grandmother Verhulst, who is traditionally credited with giving them their first instruction — most plausibly in watercolour and miniature technique. In 1583 he moved to Antwerp and entered the workshop of the landscape painter Gillis van Coninxloo, a relative by marriage, and in 1585 he was admitted as an independent master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke, enrolling as one of the 'free master's sons.'
He is best known for the enormous output of his Antwerp workshop, which produced replicas and variants of his father's most famous compositions for a local and export market: the standard catalogue links some 1,400 pictures to Brueghel and his shop, and nine documented apprentices — Frans Snyders among them — passed through it between 1588 and the late 1620s. Because he often had no access to the originals, which were locked away in elite collections such as Rudolf II's in Prague, he worked from his father's cartoons and from prints, transferring designs by pouncing. His son Pieter Brueghel III also became a painter, extending the dynasty a further generation.
Alongside the copies, Brueghel the Younger devised his own compositions in his father's idiom — energetic, bold, and bright, adjusted to seventeenth-century taste. The most successful was The Village Lawyer (also called The Tax Collector's Office or The Payment of the Tithe), which survives in numerous signed and dated versions. His peasant fairs, proverb scenes, and winter landscapes are picturesque and lively, if generally judged to lack his father's subtlety and humanism. Long overshadowed and largely forgotten in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he was rediscovered in the twentieth, and his workshop's diligence is now valued both in its own right and because his copies preserve knowledge of lost works by his father.
The words the record keeps using: earthy, bustling, festive, wry, bright, workmanlike, picturesque.
At a glance
- Lived 1564–1638
- Origin Flemish (Brabantine)
- Worked in Antwerp, Brussels
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Northern Renaissance
- Mediums Oil on panel
- Techniques Oil glazing, Atmospheric perspective
Works in the archive
- Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, 1601 (Museo del Prado, Madrid)
The Prado's version (dated by the museum to c. 1601) of the composition Brueghel the Younger and his shop copied more often than any other of his father's works — Ertz documented well over a hundred related copies.… - Paying the Tax (The Tax Collector), 1620 (USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles)
One of the many workshop versions of Brueghel the Younger's most successful original design, variously called The Village Lawyer, The Tax Collector's Office, or The Payment of the Tithe. Behind a paper-strewn desk a… - A Village Festival in Honour of Saint Hubert and Saint Anthony, 1632 (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
A teeming kermis, or village fair, in which the nominal religious occasion — a procession bearing statues of Saint Hubert and Saint Anthony toward the church — is all but lost amid the revelry. Children brawl over…
What was said
Technical study of the paintings shows that Brueghel the Younger reproduced his father's compositions on a large scale by transferring designs through pouncing, working from cartoons and from prints rather than always from the originals, an operation only possible through his large, well-organised workshop.
Silver argues that the son's large-scale copying was central to popularising Pieter Bruegel the Elder's idiom: without it the public would have had no access to works held in elite private collections such as those of Rudolf II in Prague or the Farnese in Parma, and at the same time Brueghel the Younger extended his father's repertoire with his own inventions and variations.
Among Brueghel the Younger's own designs, The Village Lawyer was the most successful; Ertz's catalogue records some nineteen signed and dated versions, made between 1615 and 1622, out of roughly twenty-five originals, a measure of the demand his workshop met.
What would Pieter make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Pieter Brueghel the Younger", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Pieter · Keep a life moment the way Pieter would · Pictures made after Pieter