Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

74 a bankrupt and his bruegels
into Egypt now in London and several other pictures by Bruegel, most likely
purchased before he was forced to leave the Netherlands in 1564. 30 Another
patron was Niclaes Jonghelinck, a very well-to-do Antwerp businessman
and receiver of the maritime tolls for the province of Zeeland.
Jonghelinck owned one of the largest painting collections of the period. 31
Among them were perhaps as many as sixteen paintings that Jonghelinck
installed in his suburban house, including the Labors of the Months of 1565,
a Tower of Babel, and most likely the Christ Carrying the Cross of 1564, the
artist’s largest surviving picture. 32 To these patrons we may now add Jean
Noirot, who in more prosperous days had acquired the five paintings by
Bruegel.
As men of wealth, moreover, Granvelle, Jonghelinck, Noirot, and
others of their class could easily have aªorded Bruegel’s most elaborate,
sumptuous productions. 33 We have little evidence, of course, as to the
prices that Bruegel’s pictures commanded in his lifetime. Nevertheless,
it must be kept in mind that Bruegel was no Herri Bles, a painter of the
previous generation, whose workshop churned out scores of landscapes
that copied or varied a few stock compositions (with figures occasionally
added by more capable artists) and executed in an often slapdash fashion
that facilitated their quick production and allowed them to be sold
cheaply at home and abroad. 34 Such paintings were dosijn werck, roughly
“works by the dozen,” a contemporary term that seems to have been applied
to cheaply and quickly produced pictures. 35 In contrast, Bruegel
seems not to have had much of a workshop, if any; only a few surviving
replicas of his paintings, the Fall of Icarus, Massacre of the Innocents, and Sermon
of St. John the Baptist, may have originated in his lifetime. 36 And quite
unlike the bulk of Bles’s production, Bruegel’s paintings were generally
what we would now call “labor intensive,” carefully executed in great detail.
This is true even of such comparatively small panels as the Suicide of
Saul of 1562, as well as of the more broadly painted Labors of the Months,
which were apparently completed in the space of one year. 37
That Bruegel’s paintings commanded comparatively high prices is suggested
by the valuations that were assigned to the pictures in Noirot’s