Art...
ArtSleuth
A reviving meal
Reapers in a cornfield
Rolling countryside, as far as the eye can see,
A picture by Pieter Bruegel
Peasant life viewed with a sympathetic eye …
…or a powerful land-owner’s lofty condescension?
A question easily answered, one might think:
since this picture belongs to a series
painted by one city-dweller for another - a rich Antwerp merchant…
… and the florid,
haggard
and toil-worn faces
of the people in it hardly tempt one to join the club.
So what do artist and patron want with these peasants, these minute worker ants?
Do they enjoy looking down on them?
And making fun of them?
Or do they find them genuinely interesting?
Episode 10 : Bruegel - La Moisson Le Bonheur est dans le pré ?
Part 1. Rustic joys
Under a pale moon …
… the golden corn…
methodically cut …
… bundled …
… bound …
… and carried off ...
… in a near-geometrical pattern …
… leads the eye in two directions:
towards the village ...
... with its houses clustered round the steeple.
And … through a carefully ordered landscape to the castle
with its dug-out pond,
dependent hamlet,
toll bridge
and winding roads.
This pear-laden tree
is a perfect image of man’s and nature’s productivity,
and these peasants are - literally and figuratively - at the root of it.
while one of them sleeps , exhausted by his labours,
the others settle down merrily to their meal.
Stirabout comes first,
then it’s out with the knives for bread and cheese,
with fruit as dessert.
A feast fit for a lord - almost!
But this is no general, freeze-frame celebration of the rural life, with its immemorial rhythms and rituals.
In fact, the whole picture is brimming with specifics, and time - the real time embodied in action and change - flows through and animates it.
These strange suspended shapes, for example ...
… are apples which this peasant has shaken from the tree …
… and the children are gathering.
And here, beside another fruit-picker, time speeds up
, and we see a group of men in hot pursuit of others
trespassers, perhaps, chased off by guards from the castle?
For others, it’s time to relax:
This scene of bathing monks is a full action sequence. We see them:
- clothed,
- stripped,
- entering the water,
- testing the temperature,
- getting ready to dive,
- going bottom-up
- waving jubilantly.
And these villagers are playing throw-the-stick:
the one who kills the goose gets to keep it
a game which Hogarth, two centuries later, attacked as cruel and barbaric
Further on, this man - caught in the act of relieving himself in front of the best-kept of the peasants’ houses.
This motif, which recurs in Bruegel’s Proverbs, is a classic expression of contempt
- either for the world, as here,
or for the authority symbolised by the gibbet.
At first sight, this landscape painting seems to depict the three orders in society
- as fixed and immutable as the seasons themselves:
the nobles, who fight to preserve peace and order in this world,
the clergy, who pray for everyone’s salvation in the next,
and ordinary people, who work to satisfy their own and others’ worldly needs.
But the castle here seems diminished and forlorn,
the monks are not praying,
and the only ones working are the peasants.
The only ones? Not quite! The ships in the distance stand for maritime trade, which is booming.
This is the fundamental change reflected in the picture
- and it is taking place on the horizon, well beyond the confines of the old feudal system.
So who is the picture’s real hero?
The peasant working his smallholding, or the merchant who dominates him - and the world?
Part 2. Remote - but riveting
The merchant’s name is Jongelinck,
and Bruegel’s seasons are to hang in the dining room at his country villa.
How does he regard these peasants?
They certainly don’t appear to put much trust in us
- indeed, our watching presence seems positively unwelcome!
…and this motif is ambiguous in Bruegel :
In The Beekeepers, the well-equipped specialists outsmart the amateur and make off with the honey.
In this scene, the jeering peasant, himself on the point of falling into the stream,
is as much the butt of the joke as the rash birdnester in the tree.
Theft itself can be a merry business - take this youthful peasant, who stands for the world,
as he slyly snips the sinister misanthrope’s purse from his belt.
Both Breugel and his patron habitually view ordinary life from a distance -
and this may predispose them to regard theft lightly.
The merchant, indeed, may see it in plain book-keeping terms:
since fruit and sheaves can be counted,
and also the people who need feeding -
the surplus can be calculated too!
But the distance between Bruegel and his subjects becomes most apparent
in his physical treatment of people at work.
Take this other summer scene,
where faces are hidden by carried objects and pitchers
women look like the sheaves they are binding,
and a water jar takes on human shape -
as if these people - otherwise strongly individualised
- were fusing with the work they are doing.
Work requiring physical effort and skill of a kind
far removed from the intellectual agility required of men like Jongelinck:
a passionate art-lover, he has commissioned two other series from Frans Floris.
These engravings reproduce them:one celebrates the seven liberal arts - specially to be admired, since they approximate to pure knowledge,
which serves no utilitarian purpose:
four are linked with mathematics,
- arithmetic,
geometry,
music
and astronomy –
and three with discourse
– grammar,
rhetoric
and logic -
The pictures in the other series trace the 12 labours of Hercules,
which symbolise aristocratic might.
The fact remains that these two series are infinitely more conventional and stereotyped than the Bruegel’s:
they are wooden allegories of a kind which a self-made man,
seeking to ape the style of some enlightened prince, might well choose to put on his walls.
Why do we get the feeling that these rough peasants
are the ones regarded with real interest?
Part 3. Peasants to the fore!
Before Bruegel, the peasants always seem to get mere walk-on parts.
In these nativity scenes, they remain just outside the sacred space - a stable!
Beside their dull, coarse faces, …
… the Virgin is a radiant, pale and delicate vision.
In this book of hours, their life is contrasted with that of the nobles,
in a world whose limits are set by their lord’s majestic castle.
Feasting, hunting and courtly love are for the nobles!
Back-breaking labour for the peasants!
A century later, Bruegel turns everything round: the work of the peasants is made to seem monumental …
… and the life of the nobles frivolous and irrelevant.
The other pictures in the “seasons” series confirm this impression:
the world has expanded,
the proud fortresses have receded
and, paradoxically, the peasant world has become interesting.
Why?
Perhaps because the middle-class elite – totally absorbed in the world’s affairs –
secretly envy the peasant’s narrow horizons.
While storm-battered ships are lost at sea, and fortunes lost with them…
… peasant life goes on quietly…
… and even leaves room for game and role playing
a paper crown, two thick cushions and a collar taken from a cow are enough
to make this child feel like one of the magi,
and a flute is all the adults need to parody the bucolic loves of classical mythology
Here, two obviously urban visitors appear between this unselfconscious figure
and the merrily cavorting dancers in front of the sinister gibbet …
… which also turns up in another seasonal panel.
The execution is a gri mly recent memory, …
… but the dominant note in this scene is pleasure at the sight of the fat rumps of these contented cattle,
…ambling home to the peaceful hamlet, with its playing children.
This winter scene, finally, suggests a similar link between the playful instincts of the artist,
who conceals the freezing dogs’ heads
and gives us a near-abstract bouquet of corkscrew tails ...
… and those of the skating villagers, who here display a far broader range of human reactions and feelings than they do when they are working.
Between the two extremes - the watchers from the edge
and the seasoned performers, we get:
…cautious beginners…
…those who help others…
…mishaps...
…disasters...
…and surprises
And so the difference between Jongelinck and the peasants is not a difference in their nature
- like that between serf and feudal lord -
but a difference in the breadth of their horizons.
Jongelinck owned one more picture by Bruegel:
The Tower of Babel,
which the artist placed in a contemporary Flemish town.
It certainly denounces human pride.
But it also marks a new divide between the ambitious urban elite, who fix their eyes on the horizon,
and who love to build
and take risks...
…and the great mass of the people, who stick to what they know,
and never dream of stirring from their own small patch of land.
The Seasons thus convey a sense of affinity and also remoteness:
affinity of the man who sees in the peasant a living reminder of humanity’s childhood, …
…with which it is good to reconnect;
remoteness of the merchant displaying all the superiority of a far- sighted visionary
and contesting the voluptuous, decadent nobles’ control of the land.
This was the last episode of ArtSleuth season 1 Do you want more?
Find more information on: www.canal-educatif.fr
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Special thanks English subtitles: Vincent Nash
A CED film