While the Hunters in the Snow has decorated innumerable cards and calendars the painter Pieter Bruegel remains a mysterious figure. With the people in his paintings dressed in the smocks and bonnets of the 16th century it is easy to assume that Bruegel was one of their number for how else could he have achieved such clarity of detail in his work unless he had been living among them. Whether it is a harvester in a cornfield, a ploughman with his foot in a furrow or a misanthrope having his purse cut it is life as it is lived that Bruegel records. What sets him apart from other painters of his time is his ability to introduce a narrative into the manner of each person that he paints, we can see that they are doing something, there is movement, there is thought, there may be involvement with others and while we may not at this distance in time understand the story we know it is there.
Other painters since Giotto had mastered the third dimension but it was Bruegel alone who strode into the fourth dimension creating the animation in his work that makes it as vital today as it was when it left his easel. An acute observer of the world around him Bruegel cast a sometimes sardonic eye over the follies of humankind though equally he celebrated their displays of happiness and friendship which makes the viewer today smile with empathy. This is what sets Brugel apart as a painter as he stands viewing the day to day life of his world showing us human behaviour with all its earnestness tears and laughter, turning it inside out and presenting it to us as the dark side of the mirror. The 16th century was a time when patronage in southern Europe was dominated by the Church and the aristocracy with religious themes being the required subject matter. But while this was true in the south a different attitude prevailed in the north where wealth had reached the hands of the merchant classes. It was their secular attitude that allowed Bruegel the humanist to pay scant regard to religious constraints or social boundaries and to create work that related directly to the lives of the people at the very bottom of the hierarchy. The earthiness of his paintings is why on the one hand they appealed so much to his merchant patrons and on the other why they were dismissed with faint praise by such as Giorgio Vasari with his dismissive “ diverse Flemish imitators” and by Michelangelo with his comment that northern painters were only concerned with external precision.
In The Netherlandish Proverbs people could see themselves in streets that they felt they could recognise. Above all the axioms of the proverbs were of the day to day world in which they lived and where they used the very phrases of the proverbs. These were their neighbours in predicaments that they had faced and had overcome and if not then perhaps they had been the butt of laughter and mockery. While much of Bruegel’s work was aimed at falsity and inconsistency he could as in Childrens’ Games paint with a charm and innocence that beguiles his audience with each group of figures engaged in their own little world where each child is alive with movement and interacting with the next. So his canvas is alive with movement with multiple stories caught in moments that explain in a gesture without the need for words what might otherwise be lost to the viewer. Yet not everything is clear to the modern eye.
Why was it that of all the children in the painting only one is wearing clogs or why in The Hunters are there Alpine mountains in Flanders? And why is it that in The Peasant Wedding the bagpipe player and the seated man in black are both staring up out of the picture frame to something that is beyond our view, a gesture that suggests another event that Bruegel alone could have explained. With no letters or writings to clarify his thoughts in the composition of his works details such as these remain an enigma. Each viewer may make a personal interpretation and perhaps it is better left at that. Opinions change but the paintings endure. ILP