Jan Brueghel the Elder

Jan Brueghel the Elder was born in Brussels as the son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Maria (called 'Mayken') Coecke van Aelst. His mother was the daughter of the prominent Flemish Renaissance artists Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Mayken Verhulst. His father died about a year after Jan's birth in 1569. It is believed that after the death of his mother in 1578, Jan, together with his older brother Pieter Brueghel the Younger and sister Marie, went to live with their grandmother Verhulst, who was by then widowed. The early Flemish biographer Karel van Mander wrote in his Schilder-boeck published in 1604 that Verhulst was the first art teacher of her two grandsons. She taught them drawing and watercolour painting of miniatures. Jan and his brother may also have trained with local artists in Brussels who were active as tapestry designers. Jan and his brother Pieter were then sent to Antwerp to study oil painting. According to Karel van Mander he studied under Peter Goetkint, an important dealer with a large collection of paintings in his shop. Goetkint died on 15 July 1583 not very long after Jan had started his training. It is possible that Jan continued his studies in this shop, which was taken over by Goetkint's widow, as no other master is recorded. He then travelled on to Naples after probably spending time in Venice. In Naples he produced some drawings after June 1590 which show his interest in landscapes and monumental architecture. Upon returning to Antwerp in September 1604 Brueghel bought a large house called "De Meerminne" (The Mermaid) in the Lange Nieuwstraat in Antwerp on 20 September 1604. The artist remarried in April 1605. With his second wife Catharina van Mariënburg he had 8 children of whom Ambrosius became a painter. When John Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Eisenach passed through Antwerp in 1614 he took time to pay a visit to Rubens and Brueghel in their workshops. Brueghel received many official commissions from the Antwerp city magistrate. Four of his paintings were offered by the Antwerp city magistrates to the Archduke and Duchess Albrecht and Isabella on 27 August 1615. He was in 1618 one of twelve important painters from Antwerp who were commissioned by the Antwerp city magistrates to produce a series of paintings for the Archduke and Duchess Albrecht and Isabella. For this commission, Brueghel coordinated the work on a painting cycle depicting an Allegory of the Five Senses. The artists participating in the project included Rubens, Frans Snyders, Frans Francken the Younger, Joos de Momper, Hendrick van Balen the Elder and Sebastiaen Vrancx. The works were destroyed in a fire in 1713. On 9 March 1619 Brueghel bought a third house called Den Bock (the Billy Goat) located in the Antwerp Arenbergstraat. When on 6 August 1623 his daughter Clara Eugenia was baptized, Archduchess Isabella and Cardinal Borromeo were her godparents. Jan Brueghel died on 13 January 1625 in Antwerp from complications arising from a gastrointestinal upset. The artist's estate was distributed on 3 June and 23 June 1627 among his surviving wife and his children from both marriages. Rubens, Hendrick van Balen the Elder, Cornelis Schut and Paulus van Halmaele were the executors of his last will. Rubens was the guardian of the surviving Brueghel children. ==Work==

General Jan Brueghel the Elder was a versatile artist who practised in many genres and introduced various new subjects into Flemish art. He was an innovator who contributed to the development of the various genres to which he put his hand such as flower still lifes, landscapes and seascapes, hunting pieces, battle scenes and scenes of hellfire and the underworld. His best-known innovations are the new types of paintings, which he introduced into the repertoire of Flemish art in the first quarter of the 17th century such as flower garland paintings, paradise landscapes and paintings of art galleries. Unlike contemporary Flemish Baroque artists, such as Rubens, he did not produce large altarpieces for the local churches. Jan Brueghel the Elder achieved a superb technical mastery, which enabled him to render materials, animals and landscapes with remarkable accuracy and a high degree of finish. He had an accomplished miniaturist technique allowing him to achieve an accurate description of nature. While his brother Pieter was engaged in the large-scale production of numerous works for the Antwerp art market, Jan Brueghel worked for a select clientele of aristocratic patrons and collectors of pictures to create more expensive and exclusive images. His works, such as his paradise landscapes, appealed to the aesthetic preferences of aristocrats who loved collecting such precious objects. His works, often painted on copper, were luxury objects intended for the simple pleasure of viewing as well as contemplation. Collaborations Collaboration between artists specialised in distinctive genres was a defining feature of artistic practice in 17th-century Antwerp. Jan Brueghel was likewise a frequent collaborator with fellow artists. As he was an artist with a wide range of skills he worked with a number of collaborators in various genres. His collaborators included landscape artists Paul Bril and Joos de Momper, architectural painter Paul Vredeman de Vries and figure painters Frans Francken the Younger, Hendrick de Clerck, Pieter van Avont and Hendrick van Balen. His collaborations with figure painter Hans Rottenhammer began in Rome around 1595 and ended in 1610. Rottenhammer was a gifted figure painter and known for his skill in painting nudes. Initially when the artists both lived in Venice, their collaborative works were executed on canvas, but in their later collaborations after Brueghel had returned to Antwerp they typically used copper. After Brueghel's return to Antwerp, their collaboration practice was for Brueghel to send the coppers with the landscape to Rottenhammer in Venice, who painted in the figures and then returned the coppers. In a few instances, the process was the other way around. Brueghel and Rottenhammer did not collaborate only on landscape paintings with figures; they jointly created one of the earliest devotional garland paintings, made for Cardinal Federico Borromeo, depicting a Virgin and Child surrounded by a flower garland (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana). While in his collaborations with Hans Rottenhammer, the landscapes were made by Brueghel, the roles were reversed when he worked with Joos de Momper as it was Brueghel who provided the figures to the landscapes painted by de Momper. An example of their collaboration is Mountain Landscape with Pilgrims in a Grotto Chapel (, Liechtenstein Museum). There are about 59 known collaborations between Brueghel and de Momper making de Momper his most frequent collaborator. Hendrick van Balen the Elder was another regular collaborator with Jan Brueghel. Their collaboration was simplified by the fact that from 1604 onwards both painters had moved to the Lange Nieuwstraat, which made it easier to carry the panels and copper plates on which they collaborated back and forth. In their early collaborations they seem to have made major corrections to the work of the other. For instance, in the early collaborative effort The Return from War: Mars Disarmed by Venus Rubens overpainted most of the lower-right corner with grey paint so he could enlarge his figures. In later collaborations the artists seem to have streamlined their collaboration and agreed on the composition early on so that these later works show little underdrawing. As court painters to the archdukes their collaborations reflected the court's desire to emphasise the continuity of its reign with the previous Burgundian and Habsburg rulers as well as the rulers' piousness. While they were mindful of the prevailing tastes in courtly circles, which favoured subjects such as the hunt, the two artists were creative in their response to the court's preferences by devising new iconography and genres, such as the devotional garland paintings, which were equally capable of conveying the devoutness and splendour of the archducal court. The joint artistic output of Brueghel and Rubens was highly prized by collectors all over Europe. Jan Brueghel is regarded as an important contributor to the emerging genre of the flower piece in Northern art, a contribution that was already appreciated in his time when he received the nickname 'Flower Brueghel'. While the traditional interpretation of these flower pieces was that they were vanitas symbols or allegories of transience with hidden meanings, it is now more common to interpret them as mere depictions of the natural world. Brueghel's approach to these works was informed by his desire to display his skill in giving a realistic, almost scientific rendering of nature. These works reflected the ideological concerns demonstrated in his work, which combined the worldview that nature was a revelation of a god with the interest in gaining a scientific understanding of nature. Brueghel's flower pieces are dominated by the floral arrangements, which are placed against a neutral dark background. Minor details such as insects, butterflies, snails and separate sprays of flowers or rosemary may occasionally be added but are subordinate to the principal subject. Brueghel often repeated motifs in his flower pieces. Even so, he was able to give each work a remarkable freshness and vitality of its own. The genre of garland paintings was inspired by the cult of veneration and devotion to Mary prevalent at the Habsburg court (then the rulers over the Habsburg Netherlands) and in Antwerp generally. The genre was initially connected to the visual imagery of the Counter-Reformation movement. Garland paintings were usually collaborations between a still life and a figure painter. Brueghel's collaborators on garland paintings included Rubens, Frans Francken the Younger and Pieter van Avont. An example of a collaborative garland painting made by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens is the Madonna in Floral Wreath (1621, Alte Pinakothek). An example of a collaborative garland painting he made with Hendrick van Balen is the Garland of Fruit surrounding a Depiction of a Goddess Receiving Gifts from Personifications of the Four Seasons of which there are two versions, one in the Belfius collection and a second in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Both versions are considered to be autograph paintings, but small differences between the two suggest that the panel in the Belfius collection is the original version. More recently an identification of the goddess with Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships, has been proposed. The reason is that the goddess in the medallion has none of the attributes traditionally connected with Cybele. Landscapes Jan Brueghel's father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is regarded as an important innovator of landscape art. By introducing greater naturalism in his Alpine mountain settings, his father had expanded on the world landscape tradition that had been founded mainly by Joachim Patinir. Some of Pieter the Elder's works also foreshadowed the forest landscape that would start to dominate landscape painting around the turn of the 16th century. Pieter the Elder also developed the village and rural landscape, placing Flemish hamlets and farms in exotic prospects of mountains and river valleys. Jan developed on the formula he learned from his father of arranging country figures travelling a road, which recedes into the distance. He emphasised the recession into space by carefully diminishing the scale of figures in the foreground, middle-ground, and far distance. To further the sense of atmospheric perspective, he used varying tones of brown, green, and blue progressively to characterise the recession of space. His landscapes with their vast depth are balanced through his attention to the peasant figures and their humble activities in the foreground. Like his father, Jan Brueghel also painted various village landscapes. He used the surrounding landscapes as the stage for the crowds of anecdotal, colourfully dressed peasants who engage in various activities in the market, the country roads and during the rowdy kermesses. Jan Brueghel was along with artists such as Gillis van Coninxloo one of the prime developers of the dense forest landscape in the 17th century. Jan Breughel experimented with such works before Coninxloo's first dated wooded landscape of 1598. In his forest landscapes Brueghel depicted heavily wooded glades in which he captured the verdant density, and even mystery, of the forest. Although on occasion inhabited by humans and animals, these forest scenes contain dark recesses, virtually no open sky and no outlet for the eye to penetrate beyond the thick trees. Paradise landscapes Jan Brueghel invented the 'paradise landscape', a subgenre that involved a combination of landscape and animal painting. Works in this genre are typically crawling with numerous animals from exotic and native European species who coexist harmoniously in a lush landscape setting. These landscapes are inspired by episodes from Genesis, the chapter of the bible, which tells the story of the creation of the world and of man. The favourite themes taken from Genesis where the creation of man, Adam and Eve in paradise, the fall of man and the entry of the animals in Noah's ark. Like his flower pieces, these landscapes were informed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation's worldview, which regarded earth and its inhabitants as revelations of their god and valued artistic representation of, and scientific investigation into, that divine revelation. As described above, Breughel's friend and patron, the Counter-Reformation Cardinal Federico Borromeo, had particularly emphasised the beauty and diversity of the animal world. Brueghel tried to render this worldview in his paradise landscapes. The novelty of Brueghel's paradise landscapes lies not only in the impressive variety of animals, which the artist studied mainly from life but also in their presentation as both figures of a religious narrative and as subjects of a scientific order. Brueghel developed his earliest paradise landscapes during his stay in Venice in the early 1590s. His first paradise landscape known as The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man is now in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome. The reference to Genesis in the picture appears in a small vignette representing the creation of Man in the background, but the main focus is on the animals and the landscape itself. This work was the first paradise landscape in which Brueghel 'catalogued' animals and depicts common and domesticated types. Brueghel's interest in the cataloguing of animals was stimulated by his visit to the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in Prague. The emperor had established an encyclopedic collection of rarities and animals. While in his early paradise landscapes Brueghel seems to have based some of his renderings of the animals on works by other artists, he later could rely on studies from life of the various species in the menagerie of the court in Brussels. Brueghel had also seen Albrecht Dürer's depiction of animals during his visit to Prague and had made a painted copy of Dürer's watercolour The Madonna with a Multitude of Animals (1503). Dürer's representations of animals play a pivotal role in Renaissance zoology, since they are the purest artistic form of nature study. The studies of animals by Flemish artists Hans Bol and Joris Hoefnagel also had an important influence on Brueghel. In particular Hoefnagel's Four Elements (1575–1582) was the first artistic work to categorise animals in a book format. Hoefnagel's approach to the representation of the animal world combined natural historical, classical, emblematic, and biblical references, which incorporated the various species into the categories of the four elements of the cosmos: earth, water, air, and fire. Brueghel's paradise landscapes also embodied the encyclopedic attitudes of his time by depicting a wide variety of species. Brueghel continued refining his treatment of the subject of paradise landscapes throughout his career. The many renderings and variations of the paradise landscape produced by Brueghel earned him the nickname Paradise Brueghel. Scenes of hell and demons Jan was early on nicknamed 'Hell Brueghel' but by the 19th century that name had become erroneously associated with his brother Pieter the Younger. Jan Brueghel was given the nickname because of his scenes with demons and hell scenes. An example is the Temptation of St. Anthony (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which reprises a subject first explored by Hieronymus Bosch. In this demon-plagued scene the monsters are seen attacking the small saint in the corner of a large and dense forest landscape, rather than within the expanded panoramas of Patinir. Jan Brueghel is believed to have produced his hell scenes for a newer, elite audience of learned and sophisticated collectors. To appeal to this erudite clientele he often populated the hell scenes with mythological rather than religious subjects, in particular the Vergilian scene of Aeneas in Hades, escorted by the Cumaean Sibyl. An example is Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld (1619, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Other mythological themes appearing in his hell scenes included the image of Juno visiting Hades and Orpheus in the Underworld from Ovid's Metamorphoses. An example of the latter is Orpheus in the Underworld (Palazzo Pitti). In these compositions brightly coloured monsters provide the 'recreational terror' of the later manifestations of Boschian design. Brueghel's hell scenes were influential and Jacob van Swanenburg, one of Rembrandt's teachers, was inspired by them to create his own hell scenes. Gallery paintings Jan Brueghel the Elder and Frans Francken the Younger were the first artists to create paintings of art and curiosity collections in the 1620s. The genre became immediately quite popular and was followed by other artists such as Jan Brueghel the Younger, Cornelis de Baellieur, Hans Jordaens, David Teniers the Younger, Gillis van Tilborch and Hieronymus Janssens. A famous example of a gallery painting by Jan Brueghel is ''The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector's Cabinet (now referred to as The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting the Collection of Pieter Roose'') (c. 1621–1623, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). The work is believed to be a collaboration between Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymus Francken II. This gallery painting represents the early phase of the genre of collector's cabinets. During this early 'encyclopaedic' phase, the genre reflected the culture of curiosity of that time, when art works, scientific instruments, naturalia and artificialia were equally the object of study and admiration. As a result, the cabinets depicted in these compositions are populated by persons who appear to be as interested in discussing scientific instruments as in admiring paintings. Later the genre concentrated more on galleries solely containing works of art. Jan Brueghel was responsible for the large vase of flowers, which is crowned by a large sunflower. This South American flower, which could grow very tall and would turn towards the sun, was first seen by Europeans in the mid-16th century. It had been illustrated as a New World wonder in botanical treatises, but Jan Brueghel was the first to include the flower in a painting and use it as a symbol of princely patronage in this composition. By turning toward Albert and Isabella (taking the position of the sun), the sunflower symbolises the way that the arts were able to grow and blossom in the light and warmth of princely patronage. Singeries Breughel contributed to the development of the genre of the 'monkey scene', also called 'singerie' (a word derived from the French for 'monkey' and meaning a 'comical grimace, behaviour or trick'). Comical scenes with monkeys appearing in human attire and a human environment are a pictorial genre that was initiated in Flemish painting in the 16th century and was further developed in the 17th century. Monkeys were regarded as shameless and impish creatures and excellent imitators of human behaviour. These depictions of monkeys enacting various human roles were a playful metaphor for all the folly in the world. The Flemish engraver Pieter van der Borcht introduced the singerie as an independent theme around 1575 in a series of prints, which were strongly embedded in the artistic tradition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. These prints were widely disseminated and the theme was then picked up by other Flemish artists. The first one to do so was the Antwerp artist Frans Francken the Younger, who was quickly followed by Jan Brueghel the Elder, the Younger, Sebastiaen Vrancx and Jan van Kessel the Elder. Jan Brueghel the Elder's son-in-law David Teniers the Younger became the principal practitioner of the genre and developed it further with his younger brother Abraham Teniers. Later in the 17th century Nicolaes van Verendael started to paint these 'monkey scenes' as well. An example of a singerie by Jan Brueghel is the Monkeys feasting, which dates from his early years as an artist (private collection, on long-term loan to the Rubenshuis, Antwerp). This painting on copper was probably one of the first examples of a singerie painting. Jan Brueghel likely drew his monkeys in the zoo of the Archdukes in Brussels. While the composition shows the monkeys engaged in all kinds of mischief, it includes a painting above the door jamb, which is a work from Rubens' studio, called "Ceres and Pan". The representation of Ceres and Pan provides a contrast between the cultivated versus the wild world of the monkeys below. ==References==