The son also rises
PIETER BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER (1564–1638) is occasionally overshadowed by his father in reputation, but a new exhibition this autumn seeks to rectify that. At Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts, multiple versions of Two Peasants binding Faggots (there are about a dozen in total) will be displayed alongside key works by other artists, such as Simon Bening, Marten van Cleve and, of course, Brueghel the Elder.
The show, boosted by new research, will highlight how the Younger artist was no mere derivative hanger-on— despite his lucrative work reproducing his father’s paintings—but an entrepreneur in cosmopolitan Antwerp, unafraid to run a trend-savvy massmarket enterprise, not dissimilar to today’s contemporary artists.
Two Peasants binding Faggots ‘intrigues for being at once comical and sinister, childlike and sophisticated, engaging and challenging,’ says cocurator Robert Wenley, taking ‘the visitor on a fascinating journey into the past —but with lessons for our own time’. Questions are asked about whether the painting is a pastoral idyll, a comment on the hardships of peasant life, a critical image of two thieves, their one-fat, one-thin personas perhaps representing the sins of gluttony and lechery, or a Netherlandish proverb.
‘This exhibition, full of human comedy and comment, recovers a lost world of proverbial thinking that helps us appreciate how the Barber’s delightful small panel by Brueghel the Younger is not only able to pack such a powerful visual punch, but also conveyed ambiguities and complex meanings to its contemporary audience,’ adds the Institute’s director Nicola Kalinsky.
‘Peasants and Proverbs: Pieter Brueghel the Younger as Moralist and Entrepreneur’ runs from October 21 to January 22, 2023.