Peasants and Proverbs: Pieter Brueghel the Younger as Moralist and Entrepreneur
Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Two Peasants Binding Firewood, ca. 1604-16, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
Born in Brussels, he was the son the renowned painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1526/30 – 1569). Between 1588 and 1627, he took on nine formal apprentices, an indication of his studio’s success, while records reveal his workshop produced more than 1,400 paintings. These range from exact copies of famous compositions by his father, to pastiches and more inventive compositions that further promoted the distinctive Brueghelian ‘family style’, usually focused on scenes of peasant life. However, it was his prodigious and skilled output as copyist that consequently tarnished his reputation. Overshadowed by his famous father, he has often been seen as a second-rate painter, capable of only producing derivative works.
Peasants and Proverbs: Pieter Brueghel the Younger as Moralist and Entrepreneur shares recent research into a painting that’s a firm favourite with Barber visitors: the comical yet enigmatic little Two Peasants binding Firewood (about 1604-16). A dozen other versions of this composition exist, and three of them will be featured alongside the Barber version. It will set out fresh insights and offer a new appreciation of a creative and capable artist with a sharp entrepreneurial mind-set. The exhibition will also explore how the Barber’s painting probes the likely meanings and significances of the painting’s intriguing, but evidently popular, subject – the gathering of firewood in winter – and the tradition of Netherlandish proverbs and how they feature in art.
The show will feature 17 works – including paintings, drawings, etchings and engravings – from public and private collections in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic, with masterpieces lent by the Ashmolean, Oxford, the Holburne Museum, Bath, the British Library, the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, and the National Gallery, Prague.