Pieter Brueghel the Younger
The large output of his studio (some 1,400 pictures exist with plausible links to Brueghel and his shop[6]), which produced for the local and export market, contributed to the international spread of his father's imagery.
[10] According to the biographer and art theorist Karel van Mander, who published a 'Life' of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his 1604 Schilder-boeck (Painter Book), Mayken Verhulst provided her grandson Jan with artistic training;[7][11] and, on that basis, it is eminently reasonable to propose that Pieter also received an initial artistic instruction from his maternal grandmother.
[12] Early in 1583, Pieter moved to Antwerp, soon followed by his grandmother and brother Jan.[12] Pieter seems to have entered the studio of the landscape painter Gillis van Coninxloo (1544–1607), who was related to the Brueghel family through marriage[13] – the register (liggeren) of Antwerp's painters' Guild of St Luke for 1585–86 lists Gillis followed immediately by 'Peeter, his cousin and apprentice' ('Peeter, syn cosyn ends cnecht').
[15] It is not known exactly when Brueghel established his own independent studio following his Guild matriculation – his first surviving dated painting comes from several years later, in 1593.
With an average of one or two formal apprentices every few years, and perhaps several journeymen at any one time, Brueghel thus had a relatively large workforce at his disposal to assist with his prodigious output.
[1] His genre paintings of peasants emphasize the picturesque and are regarded by some as lacking Pieter the Elder's subtlety and humanism.
[11] Pieter Brueghel the Younger created original works largely in the idiom of his father which are energetic, bold and bright and adapted to the 17th-century style.
The picture also shows peasants lining up with presents such as chickens and eggs to please the lawyer, which was a common occurrence, whereas tithe payments were made in grain.
[23] Another original composition by Pieter Brueghel the Younger are four small tondos representing the Four Stages of the River (all at the National Gallery in Prague).
[18] Apart from these paintings of his own invention, Pieter Brueghel the Younger also copied the famous compositions of his father through a technique called pouncing.
[24] Pieter the Younger frequently made paintings out of his father's figural designs, including drawings for prints.
[11] One example of just such a work is the Two Peasants Binding Firewood, of which several autograph versions exist (Barber Institute of Fine Arts; Private Collection), alongside various studio productions and even copies made outside the Brueghel workshop, which seems to preserve a now-lost original composition by the Elder Bruegel.
The workshop also produced no less than 25 copies of Pieter Brueghel the Elder's St John the Baptist Preaching, the original of which is widely believed to be the picture dated 1566, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.
[28][29][30] The quality and the large number of versions produced by Brueghel the Younger suggest that he had first-hand knowledge of his father's original.
Scholars have contended that Brueghel the Elder's original picture offered a coded comment on the religious debates that raged in the Low Countries during the 1560s and that it represented a clandestine sermon as held by the Protestant reformers of that time.
