(Brussels 1564-1637/38 Antwerp)
A winter landscape with a village and a bird trap,
oil on panel, 45.5 x 58.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Belgium, since the 1990s

Klaus Ertz writes in his certificate: 'The stylistic features typical of the art of Pieter Brueghel the Younger can also be observed in the wintry village landscape to be assessed here. They include, among others: the high painterly perfection; the brushwork tracing all of the details by distinctly outlining them; Pieter the Younger’s typical figures on the ice, which seem frozen in their movements, but are nevertheless highly expressive, in spite of their caricature-like appearance; the nervous lines in the highly decorative serpentine trees; in almost all of his compositions, there are only fragments of truly vertical and horizontal lines, such as along the edges of walls or for window and door frames; this dynamic appeal is characteristic of the art of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and can be found in all of the themes treated by him; the multitude of narrative scenes of people enjoying themselves on the ice.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger repeatedly treated and varied the motif of the bird trap. The present painting, like many of the other versions, is unsigned and undated and is a further original that in my opinion dates from the second decade of the seventeenth century (from around 1616). Like most examples of this composition, I only know five of these paintings that are dated, namely 1601, 1604, 1605, 1622, and 1625. Several of the undated paintings are nevertheless signed. What is so special about Pieter the Younger is that before 1616 he signed spelling his name BRVEGHEL (“V” followed by “E”), whereas after 1616 he exclusively used BREVGHEL (“E” followed by “V”). This also holds true for all of the other paintings he produced. I do not know a single painting by the artist in which he would have deviated from the spelling used before and after 1616 respectively. But even without a signature, the present painting, as far as I can tell, is an incontestable work by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. This is attested to by both the underpainting and the characteristic stylistic features. By “underpainting” we mean lines drawn onto the priming in order to define the composition in the preliminary stages. These lines indicate the crucial positions of the figures.'

Ertz compares the present painting to four Bird Traps dating from before or after 1616:

(1) Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (signed and dated 1601);
(2) Swiss private collection (signed and dated 1604);
(3) sale, Christie’s, London, 4 July 1997, lot 32 (signed and dated 1622);
(4) Belgian private collection (signed and dated 1626).

Due to these stylistic comparisons, he dates the present painting to the second decade of the seventeenth century.

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 present painting was not known to him then. The earliest known version of this extremely popular composition (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) is dated 1601. But what was actually the source of all of 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 (see fig.). But a painting with exactly the same composition was presented in an exhibition on Flemish painting in London in 1927 and is preserved in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. This painting has been regarded as the very prototype. Ertz in this context: ̍The controversial problem of whether this inconspicuously signed painting, which is dated 1565, is really an autograph work by Pieter Brueghel the Elder of one of the replicas is very hard to say. This issue was at least provisionally resolved by Max Friedländer, who accepted the picture as autograph. Gustav Glück and Fritz Grossmann eventually pushed aside their initial doubts in favour of a positive attribution to Pieter I. Since then Brueghel scholars have unanimously accepted the Brussels painting, even if Robert Marlier argued that Pieter the Younger had not known his father’s painting, but had referred to one or several drawings kept in his workshop. Either all of the paintings by Pieter II are based on the Brussels painting, which would indeed suggest that its author is Pieter I, or it is one of the numerous copies based on a prototype that has yet to be found. The role of the drawings acting as an intermediate link between father and son does not make any sense.'

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, Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, vol. II, Lingen, 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 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 off 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 one of the most outstanding examples of this well-known composition.


Additional image:
Pieter Brueghel I, The Hunters in the Snow, 1565, oil on panel, 117 x 162 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna