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Item 1063 of 2719

Antique tin with paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

SKU: 1539

Antique tin with paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Description
Rectangular tin with a hinged lid and rolled edge. The hinge is a recessed hinge with loose tabs. The lid is executed with the painting "The Peasant Wedding" by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel. The lid has a wide red border. The decoration of this tin further consists of the painting "The census ar Bethlehem" and "The Peasant Dance".

Condition
This tin is in an original vintage condition with traces of use and age-related traces of wear and oxidation.

Size

  • Height: 7.5 cm.
  • Length: 17.4 cm.
  • Width: 11 cm.

The Peasant Wedding is a 1567 genre painting by the Dutch Renaissance painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel the Elder, one of his many depicting peasant life. It is currently housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Pieter Bruegel the Elder enjoyed painting peasants and different aspects of their lives in so many of his paintings that he has been called Peasant-Bruegel, but he was, in fact, a sophisticated intellectual, and many of his paintings have a symbolic meaning and also a moral aspect.

The bride is in front of the green textile wall-hanging, with a paper-crown hung above her head. She is also wearing a crown on her head, and she is sitting passively, not participating in the eating or drinking taking place around her. The Bridegroom is not in attendance of the wedding feast in accordance to Flemish custom. The feast is in a barn in the summertime; two sheaves of grain with a rake recalls the work that harvesting involves, and the hard life peasants have. The plates are carried on a door off its hinges. The main food was bread, porridge and soup. Other features of the scene include two pipers playing the pijpzak, an unbreeched boy in the foreground licking a plate, the wealthy man at the far right feeding a dog by putting bread on the bench, and a mysterious extra foot seen under the load of dishes being carried by the two men in the right foreground. The scene is claimed to depict an accurate portrayal of the 16th-century way of celebrating a peasant wedding.

The Census at Bethlehem (also known as The Numbering at Bethlehem) is an oil-on-panel by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1566. It is signed and measures about 115,5 cm × 164,5 cm. It is currently held and exhibited at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, which acquired it in 1902. It is one of the first paintings in western art to feature a significant snow landscape and was painted in the aftermath of the winter of 1565, which was one of the harshest winters on record.

The Peasant Dance is an oil-on-panel by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in c. 1569. It was looted by Napoleon Bonaparte and brought to Paris in 1808, being returned in 1815. Today it is held by and exhibited at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The panel, neither signed nor dated, was painted circa 1567, at about the same time as The Peasant Wedding. The paintings are the same size and may have been intended as a pair or as part of a series illustrating peasant life. They are the two most outstanding examples of Bruegel's late style, which is characterized by his use of monumental Italianate figures.

Like The Peasant Wedding, it is likely that Bruegel intended this painting to have a moral sense rather than simply being an affectionate portrayal of peasant life. Gluttony, lust and anger can all be identified in the picture. The man seated next to the bagpipe player wears a peacock feather in his hat, a symbol of vanity and pride. The occasion for the peasants' revelry is a Saint's day, but dancers turn their backs on the church and pay no attention whatsoever to the image of the Virgin which hangs on the tree. The prominence of the tavern makes it clear that they are preoccupied with material rather than spiritual matters.

Pieter Bruegel (also Brueghel) the Elder 1525-1530 – 9 September 1569) was the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting); he was a pioneer in making both types of subject the focus in large paintings.

He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and later painting in general in his innovative choices of subject matter, as one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting. He also painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to settle in Antwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer of prints for the leading publisher of the day. Only towards the end of the decade did he switch to make painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the following period of little more than a decade before his early death, when he was probably in his early forties, and at the height of his powers.

As well as looking forwards, his art reinvigorates medieval subjects such as marginal drolleries of ordinary life in illuminated manuscripts, and the calendar scenes of agricultural labours set in landscape backgrounds, and puts these on a much larger scale than before, and in the expensive medium of oil painting. He does the same with the fantastic and anarchic world developed in Renaissance prints and book illustrations.

He is sometimes referred to as "Peasant Bruegel", to distinguish him from the many later painters in his family, including his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638). From 1559, he dropped the 'h' from his name and signed his paintings as Bruegel; his relatives continued to use "Brueghel" or "Breughel".


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