(Brussels 1564–1637 Antwerp)
The Bird Trap,
oil on panel, 22 x 34.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Pieter de Boer, 1938;
Private collection, Netherlands

Literature:
G. Marlier, Pierre Bruegel le Jeune, Brussels 1969, p. 244, no. 15;
K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere, vol. 2, Lingen 1988–2000, p. 621, no. F726

Klaus Ertz confirmed the present painting, which he had not known in the original when working on his catalogue raisonné, as an autograph work by Pieter Brueghel II. A certificate (January 2017) is available.

In his monograph on Pieter Brueghel II, published in 2000, Ertz points out that he found as many as 127 Bird Traps attributed to the painter, 45 of which he believes to be autograph. He assigns as many as 51 to the category of questionable works and 31 to a group that is not by the artist’s hand. The earliest known version of this extremely popular composition (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) is dated 1601. But what was actually the source of all these paintings? In 1904, the art historian Axel Romdahl assumed that the bird traps by Pieter Brueghel II and other artists, such as Abel and Jacob Grimmer, were based on a prototype conceived by Pieter Brueghel I. There is, of course, the well-known composition by Pieter Brueghel I entitled The Hunters in the Snow in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. But a painting with exactly the same composition was presented in an exhibition of Flemish Painting in London in 1927 (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels). This painting has been regarded as the very prototype. Whatever painting may have been the prototype of this successful composition, the meaning of this seemingly harmless winter landscape is obvious. Ertz explains (see K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere, vol. 2, Lingen 1988–2000, p. 578): “Today we see an allusion to the imponderables of human life behind this ostensibly harmless and harmonious winter scene: just as the trap may strike the unsuspecting birds picking seeds as soon as someone pulls its string leading to one of the houses, so the skaters on the ice are in danger if the ice breaks. A hole in the ice may be a visible sign of this peril […] There is also the possibility that the three oversized dark ravens in the tree and on the bramble in the foreground might act as guardians of the small birds endangered by the trap; or that the branches extending over the ice have the hidden meaning of a death warning, as Wolfgang Stechow assumed; or that this village scene was meant as a portrait of the Brabant community of Sint Anna Pede.”

All of these Winter landscapes with Bird Traps, be they by Pieter Brueghel II or one of the Grimmer brothers, hardly differ from one another, and yet some conspicuous elements help to identify the individual paintings. In this context, Ertz remarks (op. cit., p. 581): “Using the work that was with Ader Tajan in Paris in 1991, these variable zones may be identified as follows: the two trees on the left, between the houses, whose trunks and branches vary from painting to painting; the two geese in the sky, the position of which may change, but which are rarely lacking in the autograph versions […]; the snow-covered shrubbery in the foreground, whose constantly changing filigree in pure white is decoratively set against the surface of the ice, rendered in greys, blues and browns; and finally the large bird on the right, which is always present and which may sometimes resemble a crow and sometimes a pigeon, altering its form depending on the branches surrounding it.”

The Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap became, as early as the seventeenth century, a category in its own right. It became one of the most popular motifs in landscape painting and embodied the entire genre of the Flemish winter landscape. The present painting is a fine example of this well-known composition.