Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

68 a bankrupt and his bruegels
ventories with more than thirty paintings, the largest containing sixty. 2
But although the estate inventories seldom identify the artists for the
works listed, Noirot’s includes the artists’ names for a fair number of his
pictures. He owned works by the leading Flemish painters of the day,
among them five pictures by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: a winter landscape,
two paintings of peasant weddings, and two peasant kermis scenes. 3 Four
of Noirot’s Bruegels, the winter landscape and three paintings of the peasant
revels—the two wedding scenes and one of the kermis pictures—were
hung in a room listed as d’achter eetkamerken, literally “the small back dining
room,” 4 where they shared space on the walls with other paintings,
among them portraits of Noirot and his family and a painting of the Virgin
Mary. 5 Noirot’s fifth Bruegel painting, a Peasant Kermis, was placed in
an upper chamber, along with a Peasant Wedding attributed to Hieronymus
Bosch. The attribution of this last picture to Bosch is uncertain, as he is
not known to have painted any peasant scenes, 6 but there can be little
doubt concerning the paintings ascribed to Bruegel. Bruegel had died in
August 1569, only three years before this auction, so these were very likely
genuine pictures from his own hand and not copies of the sort peddled
by illegal art dealers, the subject of a city ordinance issued a few years
later. 7 Moreover, one of the inventories of Noirot’s household eªects was
taken in the presence of his wife and several close associates, who presumably
would have known the circumstances under which these paintings
were acquired. 8 And although we cannot with any certainty identify the
peasant scenes with the Wedding Dance in Detroit or the two peasant scenes
in Vienna (Figs. 41–43), they were most likely very similar.
Noirot seems to have had one of the largest collections of Bruegel’s
paintings at this time, and his choice of Bruegel subjects is especially interesting,
since all but one of these paintings represented peasant revels.
In addition to the four Bruegels and the “Bosch,” he also apparently
owned two other pictures of peasant weddings for which no artist is
given. 9 This pronounced taste for rustic revels may be unique for the
period: in the almost three hundred estate inventories in sixteenthcentury
Antwerp that scholars have examined, only twenty-five peasant