Pieter Brueghel the Younger

With Galerie de Jonckheere, Paris;
From whom acquired by the present owner in 2000.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Peasants by the Fireside. This painting is on a single piece of oak, which has remained stable, flat, and secure throughout. The condition of the detail especially in the figures is remarkably fine. The group in front of the fire are virtually perfectly intact, with no trace of wear at all. The many details of life elsewhere in the room, from the clogs to the kitten, and down to the tiny drawing pinned up on the mantelpiece above the baby, are extraordinarily complete, even including the minutiae of the little twigs and the delicate wires of the bird cage. Only in the surrounding background of the room is there some slight thinness, especially around the bright doorway where the door itself and the incoming woman are a little worn although the minute trees in the distance remain intact. The light brown brushwork of the walls, always more fragile than the figures themselves, is also rather thinner surrounding the bright door than elsewhere. Only a few very minor retouchings can be seen under ultra violet light: some minute touches in the smoke of the fire above the head of the baby, a few touches on the upper left of the mantelpiece and occasional touches in the immediate base foreground, with a little unevenness in the shading of the floor in front of the door. The overall condition is very fine indeed. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The composition is known in six other versions of similar dimensions: one in a Dutch private collection; one with Galerie Francke in 1930; one with Galerie A. Lemke in 1939; two sold by Christie's New York in 1980 and 1983 respectively; and one sold by Sotheby’s Amsterdam in 2010.¹ Of these, the version in the Dutch collection is monogrammed PB at the upper left and was exhibited as Pieter Brueghel the Younger when it was with P. de Boer in 1939. The exhibition catalogue noted that the panel was previously ascribed to Marten van Cleve. It was then tentatively given to Pieter Baltens by Georges Marlier, a view subsequently shared by Stephan Kostyshyn, who dated it to the 1570s.² Kostyshyn believed that the other versions known to him belonged to the workshop of Baltens or were slightly later copies. Writing most recently in his 2002 catalogue raisonné on Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Klaus Ertz followed on the whole the views outlined by Kostyshyn and did not believe that any of the aforementioned versions could be connected to Brueghel the Younger.³

Whether Pieter Baltens invented the composition or not, there is no doubt that the present work is by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. His hand reveals itself in the saturated yet vivid colours, the meticulous rendering of details and the expressiveness of the faces. Brueghel the Younger’s authorship is supported by dendrochronological analysis of the panel, which reveals a felling date of after circa 1603 for the oak tree from which the panel was made and therefore a likely usage date sometime during the second decade of the seventeenth century. This definitively rules out both Marten van Cleve and Pieter Baltens, who died in 1581 and 1584 respectively, a fact further supported by the presence of the panel makers mark of Michiel Claessens, not known to have been active before 1590. 

The particularly beautiful underdrawing (fig. 1) in Peasants warming themselves by a hearth is entirely consistent with other examples by Pieter Brueghel the Younger dating from the 1610s. Partly traced and partly freehand, the underdrawing is directly comparable with that found in The Outdoor Wedding Dance, formerly in the Coppée Collection, sold London, Sotheby’s, 9 July 2014, lot 12, which is also thought to date to this decade.

There is believed to be precedent for Brueghel the Younger copying compositions invented by Baltens. Kostyshyn, for example, suggests that the eighteen full-size copies attributed to Brueghel the Younger and his workshop of A Performance of a Farce are based upon Baltens' painting of this subject in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. no. SK-A-2554).⁴

The contemporary fame of the composition is demonstrated by Frans Francken the Younger’s prominent inclusion of it in his Interior of an artist’s studio, dated by Ursula Härting to circa 1610, and his Interior of a Kunstkabinet of the 1620s.⁵ In the former, the composition rests on a desk surrounded by curiosities, and in the latter it hangs on a wall with other paintings and drawings, including a red chalk drawing of Lucas van Leyden’s print The Musicians and Francken’s own Solomon’s Idolatry. The dates of these two works, as well as the fact that Francken and Brueghel were both based in Antwerp and knew each other, suggests that Francken may have been copying a version by Brueghel’s hand.

A copy of the dendrochronological report is available on request.

1. For these, other than that sold by Sotheby, see S. Kostyshyn, A reintroduction to the life and work of Peeter Baltens alias Custodis of Antwerp, Ann Arbor 1995, vol. II., pp. 613–17, 658–62 and 773–74, cat nos. 32, 43–45 and 105, vol. III, reproduced figs. 57–60 and 151. For the work sold at Sotheby's see Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 30 November 2010, lot 1.

2. G. Marlier, Pierre Brueghel le Jeune, Brussels 1969, p. 330, reproduced fig. 196 and Kostyshyn 1995, vol. II., pp. 613–17, cat no. 32 and vol. III, reproduced fig. 57.

3. K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere, Freren 1998/2000, vol. I, pp. 529 and 536, cat. nos. A591, A592 and A595.

4. Kostyshyn 1995, vol. I, p. 269.

5. See U. Harting, Frans Francken der Jüngere, Freren 1989. vol. II, pp. 370-1, reproduced cat. no. 447 and M. Fontana Amoretti & M. Plomp, Repertory of Dutch and Flemish Paintings in Italian Public Collections: I. Liguria, Florence 1998, pp. 140-1, reproduced cat. no. 168.