Collection particulière, Etats-Unis, avant 1985 ;

Vente anonyme ; New York, Christie's, 5 juin 1985, n° 161 ;

Galerie Johnny van Haeften, avant 1987 ;

Collection particulière, New York ;

Galerie Johnny van Haeften, en 1993 ;

Collection particulière, Angleterre, en 1995 ;

Galerie De Jonckheere, Paris ;

Acquis auprès de cette dernière par les parents des actuels propriétaires en 2004 ;

Collection particulière, France

Klaus Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere (1564-1637/38). Die Gemälde mit kritischem oeuvrekatalog, t. II Lingen, 1988-2000, p. 562, p. 567, p. 558, repr. pl. 465 (détail), p.595-596, n° E634, repr.

In 1565, during a particularly prolific year in his career, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) conceived a series of six paintings on the cycle of the seasons, whose innovative iconography contributed greatly to his reputation as a ground-breaking artist. From the part of this project devoted to summer, two paintings have come down to us. The first, entitled Haymaking (fig. 1) in Prague at the Lobkowitz Palace (inv. 1721/1), focuses on the representation of the months of June and July, while the second, entitled The Harvesters (fig. 2) at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (inv. 19.164), on the months of August and September. In this series, the painter focuses on the transformation of nature through the passage of time, favouring the use of dramatic perspectives, where men discreetly go about their humble work. Later on, the artist developed this theme of the seasons in preparatory drawings for the engravings that were published in Antwerp in 1570 by Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570), with the assistance of the engraver Pieter van der Heyden (1530-1572). In 1565, Brueghel produced Spring, now in the Albertina Museum in Vienna (inv. 23750) and in 1568, Summer (fig. 3), today in the Print Room of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (inv. Nr. 21758). The artist’s premature death in 1569 explains the absence of autumn and winter, and it would thus fall to Hans Bol (1534-1593) to produce the preparatory drawings, which have now disappeared.

Among these four drawings it is the one from Hamburg that served as the model that inspired Pieter Brueghel the Younger in the panel that we are presenting here. Unlike the New York painting, here we find man taking back from nature the central place that it had occupied in the previous series. In a composition influenced by Italian Mannerism, the figure fills the foreground and introduces, through his gestures, a dynamic of movement that had until then remained confined to the periphery. Repeating the motifs along an axis parallel to the vanishing line, Pieter Brueghel the Elder gradually reduces the monumentality of the figures and, as Lutz Malke (1) has noted, anticipates their transposition onto an engraving by drawing them with a left-handed posture. Contrary to the apparent bucolic simplicity that emerges from the whole, the artist introduces several references to important works in the history of art that are superimposed on his metaphorical language for summer. The figure wielding the scythe with his back to the viewer was compared by Tolnay (2) to a fragment of Michelangelo’s fresco representing the Conversion of Saint Paul (fig. 4), in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel. Next to this allegory of the harvest and the month of July, another figure sits who, in grabbing a carafe to quench the thirst inflicted on him by the torrid heat, symbolises the month of August. Tolnay sees in his contorted posture a reference to the famous Laocoon group, the imitation of which by the “Italianate painters” is being mocked here.

The widespread distribution of this work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder through its engraving brought it great success in the 17th century. As Klaus Ertz (3) has pointed out, it owes part of its fortune to the work of the Antwerp painter Abel Grimmer (1570-1619), whose copy dated 1607 (fig. 5) in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp (inv. 831/1) should be noted. But it is Pieter Brueghel the Younger who is primarily responsible for the success of the print, of which he produced many versions, with a first dated 1600, now lost, which is documented by a photograph preserved in the archives of the Galerie Sanct Lucas in Vienna (4). While the panel we are presenting displays a strong proximity to the engraving, this is not the case for all the copies, some of which are more distant and combine various elements with the composition of the New York painting. This is the case, for example, of the version exhibited at the P. de Boer gallery in 1934 (5), or the one (fig. 6) sold in 2012 (6), where the original motif of the group having lunch replaces the seated drinker. This liberty taken by the artist in relation to the engraving, which was nevertheless widely distributed, led Georges Marlier (7) to say that a painting showing these variants had served as a model in the studio. Since the New York painting had remained in the collection of the Antwerp tax collector Nicolaes Jonghelinck (1517-1570) before passing to the Habsburgs, Klaus Ertz (8) assumes that Pieter Brueghel the Younger may have known it in the 1590s. If he takes this into account in the first version, it is interesting to note that in the first third of the 1620s, a period during which demand for this subject seems to have increased considerably, the motif of the seated drinker, taken from the engraving, is very often favoured. Although our panel is not dated, it can quite legitimately be assumed that it is linked to this period of the artist's activity.

Particularly emblematic of the originality of the work of the Brueghels, Summer does not appear very frequently on the art market. Synthesising the inventions that his father developed at the end of his life, Pieter Brueghel the Younger offers us here an opportunity to approach his work from the amusing angle of an allegory reduced to a genre scene. Inspired more by the engraving than by the original painting, our panel pays tribute to the indispensable activity of the men who work the land, and diminishes the impression of overwhelming heat conveyed by the copper. Thus freed from the tyranny of the sun, the Flemish countryside reveals itself to the viewer through the happy simplicity of country wisdom.

1 – Lutz Malke, Pieter Bruegel d.Ä. als Zeichner. Herkunft und Nachfolge, cat. exh., Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 1975, pp. 90-91. 

2 – Charles de Tolnay, Die Zeichnungen Pieter Bruegels, Munich, 1925, p. 39.

3 – Klaus Ertz, Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, Lingen, 1988, T. II, p. 552.

4 – Idem, p. 562, ill. 462, p. 563, rep.

5 – Idem, p. 595.

6 – Anonymous sale; London, Christie’s, 3 July 2012, n° 41.

7 – Georges Marlier, Pierre Brueghel le Jeune, Brussels, 1969, p. 230.

8 – Op. cit. p. 552