Pieter Bruegel the Elder
NG 3556 
The Adoration of the Kings

Lorne Campbell, 2014

Extracted from:
Lorne Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2014).

Oil on oak panel, 112.1 × 83.9 cm
(slightly cut at the top and at both sides)

Signature and Date

BRVEGEL M.D.LXIIII (1564)

Provenance

This was almost certainly the painting on panel of the Three Holy Kings by Bruegel, the ‘alten Prigel’, that was no. 45 in an inventory of pictures in the Hofburg in Vienna taken after, but probably not long after, 28 June 1619. It was described as ‘very old‐fashioned but magically well painted’.¹ No references to paintings by Bruegel the Elder of the Adoration of the Kings have been found in Habsburg inventories compiled between 1619 and 1780, but on 19 February 1781, in the Oratorium of the castle of Bratislava was a picture of ‘the Three Holy Kings, Breügel’.² It was transferred, possibly in 1784, to the Imperial castle at Buda (Budapest). In 1850, among paintings sent from Buda to Vienna was ‘No. 40, the Three Holy Kings, 1564, by Bruegel’.³ Since the date 1564 was mentioned, this must certainly be NG 3556. It was for a while at Schloss Augarten, an Imperial residence in the northern suburbs of Vienna. In 1893 it was in a gilded frame with a coat of arms: this was recognised as a Schloss Augarten frame – one of the type in which pictures transferred in 1882 from Schloss Augarten had arrived in the store‐rooms of the Kunsthistorisches Museum.⁴ It is not known when or how the painting left Schloss Augarten but it came into the possession of Louis or Ludwig [von] Montoyer (1801–1876).⁵ He was a son of the architect Louis Joseph [de] Montoyer (1749–1811), who had moved to Vienna in 1795, probably brought from Brussels by Albert of Saxe‐Teschen. The younger Montoyer was Burghauptmann of the Hofburg between 1850 and 1870 and died in 1876.⁶ He gave or sold the painting to Joseph Geyling (1799–1885), a painter of portraits and decorative schemes who succeeded his father in 1821 as Court Painter for Decorative Projects.⁷ His son Joseph Andreas Geyling (1825–1893), painter, professor and Imperial Councillor, inherited the picture and in 1893 tried to sell it to the recently opened Kunsthistorisches Museum. He asked 2,500 florins and though the Director of the Gemäldegalerie, the painter August Schaeffer, was keen to buy the painting, the offer was refused by the Lord Chamberlain (Oberstkämmerer) Ferdinand, Graf Trauttmansdorff‐Weinsberg – probably on the grounds that it already belonged to the Imperial collection.⁸ Joseph Geyling died in Berlin on 27 December 1893. His son Eugen Geyling, a merchant, continued to correspond with Schaeffer, who was anxious that the painting should remain in Austria‐Hungary.⁹ It was eventually sold, on 28 July 1894, for 2,500 florins to the wealthy industrialist and armaments manufacturer Georg Roth (1834–1903).¹⁰ Roth lent the picture to the Bruges exhibition of 1902. His elder son Karl Roth sold it to Guido Arnot, evidently in August(?) 1919.¹¹ Guido Arnot (1878–1946) was a dealer, who handled Egon Schiele’s work and was painted by him.¹²

Arnot is supposed to have smuggled the picture out of Austria immediately after the end of the First World War ‘in a trunk with a false bottom’.¹³ It was in Zürich in October 1919¹⁴ and in June 1920(?) was sent, via the British Legation in Bern, to London.¹⁵ After prolonged negotiations, Arnot, who had valued the Adoration at £50,000,¹⁶ agreed on 26 June 1920 to sell it to the National Gallery for £15,000.¹⁷ The Trustees accepted the offer on 21 July 1920.¹⁸

Arnot felt that he had been inveigled into lowering his price to a ludicrously low level; he considered that he was making a gift to the British people. He wrote on 26 June 1920 to Sir Charles Holmes:I wish to settle down in England and to carry on business there. If I do so I should like to make my mark at once by a notable gift to the National Gallery and am therefore willing to offer my Pieter Bruegel to the Trustees at the valuation you placed upon it, namely £15,000. At this price the transaction involves me in a considerable pecuniar[y] loss, so that if in consideration of this the Trustees can see their way to make any addition to this price I should be very grateful.¹⁹

Arnot clearly wanted in return some help in obtaining permission to settle: as an ‘Enemy’ subject, he anticipated difficulties. A letter from the Home Office dated 19 August 1920 intimated that the Secretary of State was unable to comply with his request for permission to return to this country.²⁰ Arnot eventually settled in London, where by 31 March 1931 he had set up the Arnot Gallery at 47 Albermarle Street, Piccadilly. He later tried to sell to the National Gallery a Way to Calvary attributed to Bosch; but the Trustees refused his offer at their meeting of 29 October 1935.²¹

The £15,000 was paid to Arnot in instalments and was raised from the Grant‐in‐Aid, the Temple‐West Fund (£1,500), the Florence Fund (£1,500) and donations from the National Art Collections Fund (£4,000) and the philanthropist Arthur Serena (£3,500). The purchase was completed in 1921. It was noted that ‘special gratitude is due to the owner, M. Guido Arnot, for the liberal manner in which he placed the picture at the disposal of the nation’.²²

Exhibitions

Bruges 1902 (356);²³ NG 1945–6 (7); ‘The National Art‐Collections Fund 1903–1973’, NG 1973 (not numbered); NG 1975 (186); NG 2000¹ (32); NG 2002–3 (16); ‘Saved! 100 years of the National Art Collections Fund’, Hayward Gallery, London 2003–4 (20); NG 2004 (not numbered).

Versions

Although Bruegel’s two sons Pieter the Younger (1564/5–1638) and Jan the Elder (1568–1625) were small children when their father died in 1569 and may have seen only a very few of his paintings, they had some knowledge of many of them. Presumably he had kept, and they inherited, preliminary drawings and record copies. They enabled Pieter the Younger [page 177][page 178]to produce full‐size versions of his father’s pictures that repeat fairly accurately the colours of the originals. Some of Pieter the Younger’s copies reproduce his father’s paintings in their finished states, whereas others – for example his repetitions of the Netherlandish Proverbs and the Numbering at Bethlehem – follow his father’s earlier ideas as they were expressed in his underdrawings.²⁴ The implication seems to be that Bruegel the Elder sometimes worked from full‐size cartoons that were copied as underdrawings onto his panels; he would have preserved these cartoons, which were coloured or included colour notes. In other cases, before the finished pictures left the workshop, he must have made, or asked his assistants to make, record copies, full size and coloured. None of these cartoons or record copies has survived. It may be deduced, from paintings by Pieter the Younger and Jan, that they also had access to some of their father’s drawings and to his copies of drawings and paintings by other artists, notably Bosch. Jan, for example, used for his Adoration (NG 3547: fig. 1) not only NG 3556 but also his father’s drawing known as The Gooseherd (Dresden)²⁵ and a copy after Bosch’s Prado Adoration.

Only one version of NG 3556 by Pieter the Younger is known. It is the picture sold at Sotheby’s, London, on 18 April 1989 (lot 24), painted on panel and measuring 108 × 86.5 cm (fig. 3). In the mid‐nineteenth century it was in the Convent of the Poor Clares at Tongeren; in 1980, it was owned by the Baron and Baronne F. Cogels in Brussels. It is signed in the lower right corner P. BREVGHEL but is not dated. It is claimed that Pieter the Younger changed his signature during the year 1616 from BRVEGHEL to BREVGHEL.²⁶ His Adoration would therefore date from or after 1616. By then, the original was very probably in the Imperial collection and was not accessible to Bruegel’s sons.²⁷

The version is a little less tall than the original but wider: the composition has therefore been adapted for a slightly different format. The original has been cut at the top and on both sides (see below, under ‘Technical Notes’). The copy includes parts of the sections that have been cut from the top and sides of the original, including a figure on the left; but it omits the three halberds shown in the top left corner of the original and extends the composition below the lower edge of the original, which has not been cut. Some details have been suppressed, for example the chain at Caspar’s neck and the gold ornaments in his hat. The colours follow those of the original, though Pieter the Younger does not seem to have used smalt for the Virgin’s mantle and has placed grey rather than pink objects in the cup presented by Caspar. The picture is therefore a relatively faithful copy but is far from completely accurate. It is not of very high quality; but it may give some idea of what was painted on the narrow strips cut from the edges of the original. Pieter the Younger may have been working [page 179]from a record copy or from a full‐size cartoon; comparisons with the underdrawing and finished surface of NG 3556 seem inconclusive.

Jan Brueghel took from NG 3556 the central halberdier, Joseph, the man whispering to him and the youngest king for his Adoration, known from signed versions in the National Gallery (NG 3547, dated 1598, body colour on parchment, 32.9 × 48 cm; fig. 1), at Vienna (inv. 617, also dated 1598, oil on copper, 33 × 48 cm), at Antwerp (inv. 922, dated 1600, oil on copper, 26 × 36 cm) and at St Petersburg (inv. 3090, undated, copper, 26.5 × 35.2 cm).²⁸ Other elements in Jan’s paintings come from Bosch’s triptych of the Adoration of the Kings (Prado), painted in about 1494 for Pieter Scheyfve, a merchant of Antwerp, and his second wife Agnes de Gramme (see p. 140, fig. 3).²⁹ Presumably Pieter the Elder owned a copy of Bosch’s Adoration and Jan had access to the same copy.

Jan’s paintings relate also to an Adoration of the Kings painted in glue‐size on linen (Brussels, inv. 3929), which is often considered to be an early work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (fig. 2).³⁰ It includes figures and animals that resemble their counterparts in NG 3556: Joseph, for example, is close; [page 180]the Virgin and all three kings are similar; Balthasar, though wearing similar clothes, adopts a kneeling pose like that of Caspar in Bruegel’s Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm of 1563 (fig. 4).³¹ The large figure in the lower right corner of the Brussels Adoration of the Kings appears to be a sort of paraphrase of Balthasar in NG 3556. The stable is in some ways a reversal of the stable in NG 3556, with a similar braying ass and saddle and a comparable timber construction. The painter of the Brussels picture inverts not only laterally but also spatially. The boy with the large dog in the lower left corner is like the boy in the foreground of Bruegel’s Conversion of Saul (Vienna), dated 1567;³² in the Conversion, however, the dog is seen from behind.

The much‐copied Brussels Adoration of the Kings may be best classified as the work of a clever imitator and pasticheur of Bruegel. He has also taken ideas from the tapestry of the Adoration of the Kings (Vatican) woven from a design by Raphael’s assistants and probably known to the pasticheur from the engraved copy of the cartoon published by Jerome Cock.³³ The Brussels Adoration of the Kings may have been produced and reproduced shortly after Bruegel’s death, when his paintings were very much in demand. The Brussels painting, however, shows none of Bruegel’s genius for varying human gestures or his incomparable feeling for pattern.

Technical Notes

The panel has been cut at the top and at both sides; it has a pronounced convex warp. The picture has sustained some damage along the left edge; the top edge was slightly damaged in transit to Wales in September 1939. It is otherwise well preserved. Blisters were laid in 1955. It was cleaned in 1970–1. The Virgin’s blue mantle is painted with smalt, a pigment that often deteriorates badly and can lose its colour completely (fig. 9). Here, especially in the lighter areas, where it is mixed with lead white, the smalt has lasted remarkably well, although it is likely that there is still some degree of colour loss. Where smalt has been used in the sky, however, it has suffered more significant deterioration and there is little trace of the original blue colour. The paint now has a translucent yellowish‐grey appearance that arises from the concurrent discoloration of the oil binding medium. Similarly, the shadowed areas of Melchior’s sleeves, painted with mixtures of smalt, red lake and lead white, should be purple but are now brownish, because of alteration of the smalt (fig. 11); but where a similar mixture was used with a higher proportion of lead white, in the mauve cap of the figure with spectacles at the right edge, the colour is well preserved (fig. 18). Some of the red lakes have faded, notably in the lighter parts of Caspar’s jacket, and in those heads and hands that now look rather schematic.

The panel consists of three boards of oak, placed vertically and joined with dowels, two in each join: the upper ones near the top edge; the lower ones about 59 cm below the top edge (fig. 6). The panel is 112.1 cm high at the left edge, 111.9 cm high at the right edge, 83.9 cm wide at the top and 83.5 cm wide at the lower edge. The boards, measured at the centre of the height, are 27.2 cm, 28.3 cm and 28.2 cm wide. The support is 0.9 cm thick (measured at the centre of the top edge). It has been cut at the top, perhaps by about 3 cm, and at both sides, possibly by about 6 cm on the left and about 1 cm on the right. It may once have measured about 115 × 91 cm.³⁴ 115 cm is 4 feet of Antwerp (114.72 cm, the Antwerp foot being equivalent to 28.68 cm). 91 cm is approximately 3 feet of Antwerp (86.04 cm). Many of Bruegel’s panels are between 114 and 124 cm in height. No dendrochronological investigation has yet been made.

Strips of canvas have been glued along the upper and lower edges of the reverse and the lower section of the left edge. Another strip has been stuck across the first at the top right corner. At the centre of the left edge is written, in pencil, parallel to the edge, No 23. Another, similar pencil mark, N2[], is at the centre of the top edge. Below this a stencilled number, partially erased, could be 2?8?248.

The ground is chalk bound with animal glue (identified by FTIR ) and is covered by a thin priming layer of white and perhaps some black. This has been applied quickly and the texture of the brushstrokes is clearly visible through the paint. The underdrawing, which is in black in a liquid medium, has been made over the priming (fig. 5). Because of the texture of the priming, some of the lines appear broken and may look as though they were executed in a dry medium; but they are not. The thin paint has become more transparent with age, so that much of the drawing is visible in normal light.

There are no major alterations (figs 5, 6), which makes it seem that the composition must have been worked out in advance on paper and that the underdrawing, done very quickly and certainly by Bruegel himself, must follow that preliminary design. The most important changes are in the Virgin’s head, underdrawn on an even smaller scale: her lower lip ended where the centre line of her mouth is painted. The Child’s head is slightly smaller in the underdrawing; his underdrawn left hand, where the individual fingers are not defined, is narrower and further from his face but extends further over the Virgin’s thumb, so that he seems to hold her. His right thigh is thinner in the underdrawing (fig. 8). It may look at first as if Caspar’s profile is underdrawn to the right of his painted profile. This is not the case, however, as the area between is hatched and appears to have formed part of the underdrawn draperies. In the underdrawing, Melchior’s left hand rests on the lid of his cup (fig. 10). The eye sockets of many figures are boldly drawn as circles. The archer’s are below his painted eye sockets. The toe of Balthasar’s boot is underdrawn in two different positions, above the painted toe (fig. 7).

Two blue pigments have been used: azurite in the armour and the robe of the man with the arrow in his hat (figs 20, 21); smalt in the blues of the Virgin’s mantle and the sky, as well as the (originally) purple paint of the shadows of Melchior’s sleeves (fig. 11) and the (still) mauve hat of the man in spectacles at the right edge (fig. 18). Slight differences in the composition of the smalt indicate that it is possible that two types were used; but both are rich in cobalt and would have been strongly blue in colour.³⁵ The media are linseed and walnut oils, analysed in four samples as follows. Heat‐bodied linseed oil, with a small but probably significant addition of [page 183][page 184]pine resin, occurs in the purplish hat of the figure in the top right corner. Heat‐bodied linseed oil with some pine resin recurs in the semi‐transparent green of Caspar’s robe. Linseed oil, not heat‐bodied, is found in the timber at the upper edge; while heat‐bodied walnut oil is the medium for the pale brown of Balthasar’s leather mantle.

There are drying cracks in many areas, and the ground, which may have been laid too quickly and without sufficient care, is occasionally irregular and has affected the appearance of the paint applied on top. The paint is usually applied very thinly but is sometimes impasted, for example in Balthasar’s mantle, or stippled with stiff brushes, for instance in the daub of the stable (fig. 12) or the shadows in the foreground. Bruegel has used sgraffito techniques in the patterns on Caspar’s red tunic, and elsewhere he has used his brushes to remove as well as to lay in paint. Often, he removes and lays in at a single stroke, by turning his brush. He has also worked the paint with his fingers, for he has left a fingerprint in the strut in the top right corner; and he has blotted some of his glazes by removing excess paint with cloths – for example in the red drapery over the shoulder of the man behind Balthasar. Bruegel liked painting wet‐in‐wet. Working boldly and at great speed, he could make some strange mistakes. Here he has lettered his signature so rapidly that he misspelled his name (fig. 13). At first he wrote ‘BVEGEL’, corrected by adding another B and converting the second B into an R. He was also capable of passages of immense delicacy, for instance Balthasar’s eyes and fingernails (figs 14, 15). His feeling for pattern never deserted him and informed even his most random‐seeming brushstrokes (fig. 24). Few artists have rivalled Bruegel in his use of oil paint; none has surpassed him.

Description

The Virgin is seated outside a thatched stable, built of wood, wattle and daub and in an advanced state of disrepair. The front wall may have fallen down; or Bruegel may have used artistic licence to remove it and reveal a construction remarkably similar to the gibbet in his Magpie on the Gibbet (1568: Darmstadt). The beam is sagging and the nails in it are rusting. Inside the stable, a rope halter and a simple wooden saddle are supported on a spar. A similar saddle is on the horse drawing the cart that conveys the two thieves to Golgotha in Bruegel’s Christ carrying the Cross (1564: Vienna). The ass, tethered by a rope around its neck, raises its head to pull down hay from the rack above the manger. The ox is not included.

Outside, the discoloration of the sky makes it difficult to judge the weather. Originally the smalt here would have been blue; it would appear to be a sunny winter’s day and the reflections in the soldiers’ armour are relatively bright (fig. 21). There is no sign of rain or a recent shower (contrast the Christ carrying the Cross, where a squall has just passed over). It is probably a dry and bright but cold winter’s day. The soldiers are well wrapped up against the cold. The Virgin, who has rather a small head, wears around her face and neck a long, semi‐transparent veil that covers her left eye (fig. 9). It appears to be narrowly fluted; it would have been difficult to weave and consequently an expensive item of clothing. Her dress is [page 185]a dull purplish pink; the fur linings of both sleeves are visible. The exposed sleeves of her underdress are a richer red and the white sleeves of her chemise, visible at her wrists, are fashionably long and trailing. Over her head and shoulders she wears a very full blue mantle. The blue pigment is smalt, well preserved in the lighter areas, where it is mixed with lead white, but more deteriorated in the shadows, where it would not have had its present, rather uneven, appearance.

The Child is naked, despite the cold weather, and is surrounded by a white cloth rather reminiscent of a shroud. He seems to recoil from the oldest king, though he may be smiling at him. His feet and his right hand are concealed, while his left hand is too large.

Behind the Virgin stands Saint Joseph, a fat elderly man with long white hair and a white beard. He is wearing a grey garment, apparently of coarse woollen cloth. The sewing in the shoulder seam looks like blanket‐stitching. The robe opens down the front and is closed with two pins of yellow metal and a dark brown leather belt. Its loose tongue is twisted around and tucked under the rest of the belt. Joseph holds in both hands a wide‐brimmed hat, possibly made of dyed(?) straw, and similar to the hats that he wears in the drawn Rest on the Flight (Berlin) and the paintings of the Flight into Egypt (1563: Courtauld Institute) and the Numbering at Bethlehem (1566: Brussels).

The oldest king, Caspar, kneels, almost cringes, before the Virgin and Child. He has laid aside his sceptre, which is silver, partially gilded, and taken off his hat, in which are set the six golden fleurons of a crown or coronet (fig. 16). He has also removed the lid from the gift that he presents. He has long white hair; the way in which it falls suggests that it is greasy or dirty. He wears a long green robe with very full sleeves and, over that, an extraordinary deep pink garment lined with ermine. It has long trailing sleeves and both its fur collar and its skirt are cut at the back into triangular vents (figs 17, 25). Its decorated yellow border is perhaps to be understood as embroidery worked in gold threads. The patterns on the pink fabric make diagonal stripes: one with a design of Greek keys and the two others, alternating, with wheel‐like motifs and [page 186]with scrolls. The yellow border shows, at the corner, a seated, bearded, nude man, who, resting his right arm over a vase from which water is pouring, looks very like a classical river‐god. Next to him, on the right, are four stars, the upper two having six points, the lower two, five points. A nude male stands with his legs and arms outstretched; he partly overlaps a semicircular band, rather like a zodiac, with different, but indistinguishable, shapes in its divisions. Within the semicircle sits a nude woman, who raises her right hand. Behind her is a wheel. On the right of the semicircular band is a standing female, who seems to be wearing a long skirt and whose knees are bent. Drapery attached to her head looks as if it is blowing in a strong wind and she appears to be addressing a seated nude male(?). Above the river‐god are shapes difficult to interpret. Immediately above him is a youth, apparently embracing an enormous horn. Above him is a centaur drawing a bow; he is facing the top of the painting and his back is parallel to the outer edge of the embroidery. Near the point of the V is another five(?)‐pointed star, and at the top of the V is a wheel‐like ornament.³⁶ Caspar wears a chain of interlinked, golden figures‐of‐eight. One of the improbable‐looking ermine tails of his collar passes through one of the links. Caspar’s belt is formed of golden discs wired together. His left sleeve has been caught up under his belt. In Bruegel’s Triumph of Death (Prado) the skeleton overturning the wine‐coolers in the lower right corner has tucked up his hanging sleeve in a comparable way. So too, in Bruegel’s Sermon of the Baptist (Budapest), has the man in the foreground between the palm‐reading gypsy and the Landsknecht. Caspar’s gift, contained in a golden cup, could be myrrh. If Bruegel had referred to the herbarium Ortus Sanitatis (1547) or to a translation, he would have found a woodcut of a tree exuding drops of gum and read that the best myrrh was reddish on the outside.³⁷

The second king, Melchior, is a little younger than Caspar (fig. 11). His dishevelled sparse hair is dark brown, perhaps dyed. As he looks down at the Child, his eyelids appear almost closed. His red robe is unbuttoned at the front opening; its collar and the end of its sleeve are cut into strips that are looped back on themselves. The decoration on the shoulder is difficult to understand, unless as hemispherical projections, and impossible to replicate. The brownish shadows of the sleeves and skirt of his lower garment, slashed around the elbow to reveal a yellow‐brown lining, were once purple but the blue component, smalt, has altered. Melchior wears no jewellery. He holds his gift in both hands: it is perhaps gold and is contained in a decorated and covered golden cup.

The third king, Balthasar, is black and appears to have improvised a crown by tying golden spikes to his head with a bandeau of white cloth patterned with yellow stripes and blue spots (fig. 19). Alternatively, the bandeau conceals a circlet to which the spikes are attached. The bandeau has at its edges fringes of yellow (gold?). Balthasar’s eyes appear to be wide open but the whites are indicated only by highlights around the irises (fig. 14). His garment seems to be a coat of suede, cut into strips at the bottom edge. The sleeve, which is wide, has been left open at the elbow. The hood terminates in a small sphere decorated with green and red stripes (fig. 19). From the sphere fall narrower strips of suede that broaden towards the ground. Balthasar’s stocking is grey; his scarlet boot has an old‐fashioned pointed toe (fig. 7); the golden spur is attached to a grey strap around his instep.

Balthasar’s gift is perhaps frankincense (fig. 19). The elaborate ship, which could have been hung from the long golden chain, is set with green and black jewels and is like a table nef. It is attached by the same golden chain to a green nautilus shell, from which emerges a golden monkey reaching towards a crystal sphere set in gold. On top of the shell is another crystal sphere, enclosed in golden bands that look like an armillary sphere but represent only the lines of longitude, the equator and the ecliptic or zodiac. The tropics and the Arctic and Antarctic circles are missing. On top of that sphere is an ornament in the form of a green acorn in a golden cup.

Behind Balthasar is a man wearing thick spectacles – the lenses are painted with astonishing skill and economy – which may indicate his spiritual myopia but which are also one of the attributes of the virtue of Temperance (fig. 18). His hat is purple; his robe grey; his features are of a Semitic cast. Next to him, a man whose nose and underlip are huge and swollen would appear to be furiously angry: the white of his eye is visible above and below his iris. He has long straight hair and wears a turban of white cloth. Beside him, a man touches Joseph’s left shoulder and whispers into his left ear. He is wearing a green hat of a style that would have been fashionable in [page 187][page 188]the fifteenth century. The forms of his profile and hat repeat so precisely the shapes made by the donkey behind him that Bruegel must be making a deliberate parallel between man and beast. His robe is red, the fur collar closed at the neck with a loop and button; he wears a dagger at his belt.

The central figure is a soldier wearing a steel helmet and gorget and carrying a halberd in his left hand (fig. 21). He stares in amazement at the Christ Child: the whites of his eyes are visible above and below his irises. His collar and sleeves are of chain‐mail but he wears steel gauntlets and a heavy leather surcoat. It is laced at the neck with a thong, its ends being of yellow metal, and is girded with a belt from which hangs a massive sword. All the soldiers may be presumed to be members of the kings’ retinue (fig. 20). Next to the central soldier is an archer who supports a crossbow in his left hand and whose windlass hangs from his belt. He has one arrow stuck though his hat and two more arrows under his belt and his right arm. His hat is made of dark brown fur; his moustache is grey; he wears a sort of balaclava which is bright blue and which is attached to a bib; his robe is dull red. Behind him is a man with a moustache, dressed as a German Landsknecht and wearing a red ‘Cranach’ hat and a steel gorget. The soldier beside him, apparently holding a halberd in his left hand, wears a steel helmet and a slashed grey garment with a collar similar to that worn by Melchior. On the extreme left, the bearded man has not been identified. His hat appears to be made of dark brown fur; his mantle is dark brown and is decorated with a dark green cross paty, its axis horizontal, presumably because the mantle has been furled over his right shoulder. Behind him crowd eight more soldiers, five of whom carry halberds. The soldier fourth from the left edge is not wearing a hat or helmet; his hair is standing on end. At least one soldier seems to have been lost when the left edge was cut.

Iconography

The Adoration of the Kings is mentioned briefly in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, 2:1–12. As Bruegel would have known, the kings are there described as magi ab oriente, ‘wise men from the east’ who had seen a star in the east. The star ‘went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child [page 189]was.’ Because they brought three gifts, it was reckoned that there were three of them. Bruegel makes no reference to the star and imagines a contemporary Brabantine event that takes place in wintry Brabantine weather.

The Adoration is unusual among Bruegel’s paintings because its format is upright, because it does not include any landscape and because its colour is relatively sumptuous. The format may indicate that it was designed as an altarpiece, while the splendour of the colour may have been considered appropriate for the subject. Since nothing is known about Bruegel’s own beliefs and the first owner of the Adoration has not been identified (see below), it is impossible to explain the apparent tawdriness of the kings’ magnificence, the strangely elongated proportions of the Virgin and Child, and the threatening crowding of the band of soldiers. It is, however, possible to analyse the complexities of the pattern‐making and the superb skill with which Bruegel uses echoing and contrasting colours to punctuate and stress the forms of his patterns.

The First Owner

It seems well established that NG 3556 is the picture mentioned in the ‘Vienna inventory H’, datable to 1619, of works of art in the Hofburg at Vienna that had belonged to the recently deceased Emperor Matthias (1557–1619). He had probably inherited it from his brother Rudolph II (1552–1612), who had tried, with some success, to gather together all Bruegel’s paintings. Though van Mander did not include the Adoration of the Kings in his list of the Bruegels in Rudolph’s collection, van Mander’s information on the Imperial collection seems to have come from Spranger, was by no means complete and was confined to works of art kept in Prague. The Adoration was kept in Vienna.

Rudolph acquired many, though by no means all, of his Bruegels from another brother, the Archduke Ernest (1552–1595), who between 1593 and his death in 1595 had been Governor of the Netherlands. Ernest’s secretary Blasius Hütter kept an account‐book in which he recorded various expenses.³⁸ One of Ernest’s purchases in Antwerp was a panel of the Three Kings which was perhaps by Bruegel and which could well have passed to Rudolph.

On 16 July 1594, Hütter made the following two entries in his book: To the Secretary Praets, for the purchase from his cousin of a painting by Bruegel, the Peasant Wedding, 160 florins.³⁹
…
Item von Juan von Wükh erkhaufft ettliche gemahl als Kinderspil des Bruegls, Item ein Taffel von heylg. dreykhinigen, Item eine von unser frauen, Item Ime geben ein verehrung hatt samentlich bracht, 1010 Brabts. gulden sindt … 538 fl. 40 st. (‘Item, bought of Jan van Wijk, several pictures including Bruegel’s Children’s Games; item, a panel of the Three Kings; item, another of Our Lady; item, a present made to him; altogether 1010 Brabant gulden = … 538 florins 40 stuivers.’⁴⁰)The Secretary Praets was Philippe Praets, Secretary of the Privy Council, who had married in 1587 Marie van Eeckeren.⁴¹ Her aunt Esther van Eeckeren was the wife of Jan Noirot, Master of the Antwerp Mint, who fled from Antwerp in 1572 but who had owned ‘a large panel of a peasant wedding painted in oils by P. Bruegel’.⁴² This was probably the picture bought through Praets in 1594 and now in Vienna. Jan van Wijk in 1591 held the position of sworn old‐clothes dealer to the amman – the king’s representative in the government of Antwerp.⁴³ Little else is known about him.

Eleven days previously, on 5 July 1594, Hütter had sent by barge from Antwerp to Brussels six paintings representing the months of the year. They had been presented to Ernest by the city of Antwerp and were listed in the inventory taken after his death as ‘six panels of the twelve months of the year by Bruegel’.⁴⁴ The Antwerp authorities had purchased the six pictures for 1,400 florins from the second‐hand clothes dealer Jan van Wijk⁴⁵ – the same man who, a few days later, was to sell direct to the Archduke Bruegel’s Children’s Games,⁴⁶ the unattributed Adoration of the Kings and an unattributed Our Lady.

Since Hütter did not always attribute the paintings described in his account‐book – indeed he neglected to note that the Months were by Bruegel – it is possible that the unattributed Adoration of the Kings and the unattributed Our Lady were also by Bruegel and that Hütter saw no reason to repeat the name. The Our Lady could be Ein frauenconterfeth mit einem kindl vom alten Brigel,⁴⁷ ‘a portrait of a woman with a small child by Bruegel the Elder’, which, like the Three Holy Kings by Bruegel the Elder, was listed in the Vienna inventory of 1619 but which cannot now be found. The prices paid for the pictures suggest that all three could have been Bruegels, known to have been rare and expensive commodities.⁴⁸ Neither an Adoration of the Kings by Bruegel nor an Our Lady by Bruegel are listed in the inventory taken after Ernest’s death in 1595 but this is not an insurmountable difficulty. The only Adoration of the Kings listed was attributed to ‘Hubert von Prag’.⁴⁹ It seems unlikely that a picture bought in Antwerp in 1594 was by a painter from Prague. No further reference to the Adoration bought in Antwerp has been found in Hütter’s accounts but it could have been sent to the Imperial court with a courier returning there. No charges need have been incurred for its transportation; Hütter need not have been responsible for any further expenses.

Ernest’s enthusiasm for Bruegel’s paintings was such that he acquired at least nine within four months: the six Months by gift; the Peasant Wedding, the Children’s Games and the Conversion of Saul by purchase. It was not easy to get hold of pictures by Bruegel. In December 1572, Maximiliaan Morillon warned Cardinal Granvelle that he would have difficulty in replacing his lost Bruegels, unless at great expense, as they were even more in demand since Bruegel’s death.⁵⁰ In March 1609, Jan Brueghel, who had been looking in vain for a suitable picture by his father to give to Cardinal Borromeo, noted that ‘the Emperor [Rudolph II] has spent large amounts in order to acquire all his works’ (L’imperator ha fatto gran spese per auer tutti sua opera).⁵¹ Seven of Ernest’s nine Bruegels, the Months and the Children’s Games, came from the second‐hand clothes dealer Jan van Wijk, about whom little is known.

The Months had belonged to Nicolaas Jongelinck, who in February 1566 pledged a large number of paintings as security for a debt owed to a friend. All were in his country house at Ter Beke outside Antwerp; they included sixteen Bruegels – the six Months, a Tower of Babel, a Christ carrying the Cross and eight more of unspecified subjects. Jongelinck could have had more Bruegels in his town house at Antwerp, the Sphaera Mundi; and he could very well have acquired more Bruegels [page 191]between 1566 and the artist’s death in 1569. Jongelinck himself died in 1570, heavily in debt. It took a long time to settle his estate. The amman may have intervened in the disputes and Jan van Wijk may have been empowered by his employer the amman to sell off Jongelinck’s collection. This is pure speculation: though it seems plausible to suggest that all the Bruegels sold in 1594 by Jan van Wijk came from the same source and therefore that Jongelinck may have owned the Children’s Games. It is also worth pointing out that all the eight Bruegels of specified subjects that were certainly in Jongelinck’s collection seem eventually to have passed into the possession of Rudolph II.

Jongelinck’s Tower of Babel is probably the picture now in Vienna, which is dated 1563;⁵² his Christ carrying the Cross is almost certainly the picture now in Vienna, which is dated 1564 (fig. 22);⁵³ four of the Months are dated 1565. It is possible that Jongelinck was at that period buying everything or almost everything that Bruegel was painting. The other dated paintings of those years are: the Flight into Egypt of 1563, which was in the collection of the Granvelle family; the Winterthur Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm, apparently dated 1563 (fig. 4), the early history of which is not known; the London Adoration of the Kings of 1564; the Christ and the Adulteress of 1565, which remained with Bruegel’s family; and the Landscape with a Bird‐Trap of 1565, the early history of which is not known.

The London Adoration of the Kings is certainly from the collection of the Austrian Habsburgs; it is almost certainly the Three Kings by Bruegel described in the Vienna inventory of 1619. It probably belonged to Rudolph II; it is possible that he inherited it from his brother Ernest and that it was the same Three Kings that Ernest purchased, in July 1594, with the Children’s Games, from Jan van Wijk. Whether or not it came from Jan van Wijk, it may conceivably have belonged to Nicolaas Jongelinck.

Nicolaas Jongelinck (1517–1570)⁵⁴

Nicolaas was one of the four sons of Pieter Jongelinck, an official of the Antwerp Mint, and Anna Gramaye, whose father was Piedmontese. Two of Nicolaas’s brothers trained as painters but made their careers in the Mint; Nicolaas’s third brother was Jacob (Jacques) Jongelinck (1530–1606), an important sculptor who worked with Leone Leoni, was employed by Cardinal Granvelle and Philip II, held a position at the Antwerp Mint and made portrait medals of Bruegel’s friends Jacob Franckaert (1565) and Abraham Ortelius (1578). Nicolaas made a fortune by marrying a wealthy first wife, by speculating in lotteries and insurance, and by farming lucrative taxes: the Zeeland Toll, levied on goods coming into Antwerp by sea; the Great Land Toll of Brabant, levied on goods transported overland into or through Brabant; and the Wine Excise, levied on every barrel of wine imported into Brabant, Flanders and Zeeland. Little is known of his character or opinions but, according to Lampsonius, writing in 1563, he was ‘born of good stock, of the lesser citizens, possessed of wealth but an ardent lover of all the arts, also a hater of sordid avarice and its sworn enemy’.⁵⁵ His two principal residences were the Sphaera Mundi in the Kipdorp of Antwerp, acquired in 1558, and his suburban mansion at Ter Beke, on the Markgravenlei, acquired in 1554.⁵⁶ It had a courtyard, an orchard and grounds covering an area of 7,000 square metres. Philip II visited him there, probably in 1556, and admired his series of paintings by Frans Floris representing ten of the Labours of Hercules.⁵⁷ He had another series by Floris of the seven Liberal Arts.⁵⁸ In 1566, he pledged to the town of Antwerp, in security for a debt of 16,000 guilders owed by his friend Daniel de Bruyne, many of his paintings: the two series by Floris; other paintings by Floris, including a Judgement of Paris and a Feast of the Gods; a Dürer of an unknown subject; and sixteen Bruegels, including the series of the Months, a Tower of Babel and a Christ carrying the Cross. He also owned a huge landscape, 16 feet across, by Gillis van Coninxloo; and the series of bronzes by his brother Jacob of Bacchus and the seven Planetary Deities. Nicolaas’s involvement in the affairs of one or two leading tapestry‐makers may be some indication that he dealt in tapestries.⁵⁹ Indeed he may have been a dealer in, as well as a collector of, pictures and sculpture.

The Genesis of NG 3556

One of Bruegel’s main sources of inspiration was the triptych by Bosch of the Adoration of the Kings (Prado), painted around 1494 for Peeter Scheyfve, a merchant of Antwerp, and his second wife Agnes de Gramme (p. 140, fig. 3). This much‐copied Adoration was probably still in Antwerp in Bruegel’s time. The donor’s third wife and widow owned the estate of Ter Beke, on which Nicolaas Jongelinck’s mansion was to be built. She bequeathed the property to her daughter Margriet Scheyfve, who married Willem van de Werve; they sold it in 1547 but lived on in Antwerp until the 1560s. In 1554, Nicolaas Jongelinck acquired his part of the estate on which the ‘Jongelinckshof’ was built.⁶⁰ Margriet Scheyfve’s first cousin Jan Scheyfve (1513–1581), Chancellor of Brabant, was in contact with Jacob Jongelinck, who in 1575 represented him in a portrait medal.⁶¹ It seems that Bruegel may well have seen Bosch’s triptych; it is almost certain that he owned a copy of the centre panel and that the copy was later accessible to his son Jan Brueghel.

Another source of inspiration was Gossart’s Adoration of the Kings (NG 2790), painted for the Abbey Church of Geraardsbergen in about 1510–15.

Many art historians who have discussed Bruegel’s treatment of the Adoration of the Kings have considered that the Brussels Adoration of the Kings (fig. 2) is an early work by Bruegel, and that the Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm, undoubtedly by Bruegel (fig. 4), is dated 1567 – four years after the London Adoration. In fact the Brussels Adoration appears to be by a clever pasticheur working after Bruegel’s death but using the London composition as one of his sources; and the Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm is dated 1563 – MDLXIII rather than MDLXVII – and therefore precedes rather than postdates the London picture. If this revised chronology is accepted, it becomes very much easier to understand the evolution of both Bruegel’s paintings.

The Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm is one of the earliest of Bruegel’s relatively few representations of subjects taken from the Gospel narrative. He has chosen to visualise Bethlehem as a contemporary Brabantine town; to depict the Adoration, which took place on 6 January, in a snow‐covered landscape and during a severe and heavy snowstorm; and to relegate the Holy Family and the kings to the lower left corner of his panel. Often, before 1563, artists had imagined the biblical narrative as happening in local and contemporary settings; a few painters and illuminators had represented snow and even snowstorms; and some painters, for example Aertsen and Beuckelaer, had banished their principal subjects from the foreground to the middle ground and background. The idea of placing the Virgin and Child in a corner, where they are partially concealed by a fragment from a ruined wall, may be unprecedented; and Bruegel may well have been the first to paint the subject in a tempest of snow. The Adoration was not his first winter scene. His drawing of Skaters outside the St George’s Gate at Antwerp, dated 1558, was made to be engraved.⁶² In 1563, when Bruegel painted the Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm, he was still a year away from the exceptionally severe winter of 1564–5, when enormous icebergs entered the North Sea and the ice on the frozen Schelde was a foot thick.⁶³

In the Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm, the stable, the Virgin and Child and the three kings are all relatively similar to their counterparts in Bosch’s triptych of the Adoration of the Kings, though the figures are reversed. There are no soldiers in the foreground of Bosch’s centre panel, but armies rampage across the landscape behind the stable. Bruegel’s soldiers swarm around the town, while the main focus of attention may be the two pack‐mules in the centre of the picture.⁶⁴ Another laden mule is passing under the archway on the right and all are being propelled at some speed towards the back of the stable. The ruined building on the right is probably the palace of David. In the foreground, on the bridge over the frozen river, foresters are at work and ignore the kings. Men draw water from a hole cut into the ice; while a child, propelling himself across the ice on an improvised sledge, ignores not only the kings, the Holy Family and the foresters but also the evidently vehement protestations of his gesticulating mother, who watches from behind a wall. Children on similar sledges appear in several other paintings by Bruegel.⁶⁵

In the London Adoration of the Kings, the setting is reduced to the barest minimum. The gallows‐like structure is like the stable in the Winterthur Adoration and the principal figures are similar: the first two kings and the Virgin and Child are reversed, so that they now face in the same directions as their prototypes by Bosch; but Joseph and Balthasar are not reversed and resemble their counterparts in the Winterthur picture. The soldiers and other bystanders are brought forward to crowd rather ominously around the Holy Family. Caspar’s hat, incorporating a coronet, his sceptre and the lid of his gift, placed at the Virgin’s feet, are immediately reminiscent of the comparable objects, comparably placed, in Gossart’s great Adoration of the Kings (NG 2790). The archer with the arrow stuck though his hat is reminiscent of figures by Bosch, for example the man in green in his Christ Mocked (NG 4744). The Landsknecht behind the archer is like, in reverse, the circular Head of a Landsknecht (Montpellier), monogrammed PB and attributed to Bruegel or his son Pieter the Younger (fig. 23).⁶⁶ It is possibly based on a sketch by Bruegel, kept in his workshop as a study in facial expression.

It is interesting to compare the London Adoration with Bruegel’s Christ carrying the Cross (Vienna: 124 × 170 cm), painted in the same year, 1564, and possibly for the same patron, Nicolaas Jongelinck (fig. 22). The Christ carrying the Cross is a little higher than the Adoration and approximately twice its width; but the figures are on a very much smaller scale. The Virgins are similarly dressed and posed; Saint John in Christ carrying the Cross is not unlike the central soldier in the Adoration; the kneeling woman on the left of Saint John echoes to some extent Caspar in the Adoration. The group on the right of the Christ carrying the Cross, above the horse’s skull, are said to be ‘reconfigured’ as Balthasar and the onlookers behind him in the Adoration.⁶⁷

The Interpretation of NG 3556

When money was being raised for the acquisition of the Adoration, the Secretary of the National Art Collections Fund commented upon Bruegel’s ‘leading characteristics of dramatic [page 193]variety and an intensity amounting almost to grotesqueness in facial types and expression’.⁶⁸ The editor of the The Times noted:Though he [Bruegel] went to Italy, he is not directly influenced by the Italian art of the High Renaissance, except in a certain grandeur and subtlety of composition, which was not Flemish. But the mood and the people are Flemish indeed – grotesque, northern, one might even say Protestant. The picture is full of humour, of characters almost comic … [It is] both grand and subtle in design, with a curious sense of movement and change which recalls the more conscious experiments of very modern artists. It is beautiful in colour, and the execution throughout is masterly.⁶⁹ No one can question Bruegel’s genius as a painter, his supreme mastery of the oil technique. Nor can anyone deny his command of design: the placing of every brushstroke seems considered with immense care for its place in an extraordinary variety of abstract patterns. He is, nevertheless, a wonderfully spontaneous painter who works at tremendous speed and with great confidence and whose instinct for pattern‐making is unfailingly sure. The cutting of the top of the Adoration makes it impossible to follow precisely the measured, geometric bases of his creativity; but every detail, for example the hay above the central soldier’s head (fig. 24) or the shell in Balthasar’s gift (fig. 19), is a triumph of design.

Bruegel was a magnificent, though not an academically accurate, draughtsman, who could catch with great economy of line a movement, an attitude, a gesture, a facial expression. His figures are normally rather squat but, in the Adoration, the Virgin, the Child and all three kings are elongated and have relatively small heads. The soldiers and onlookers, in contrast, have Bruegel’s normal proportions. The discrepancy between them and the others is not too disturbing because only one soldier is visible from head to foot: the archer, who stands with his legs apart, whose feet are not easily distinguishable, whose contours are – probably deliberately – broken and obscured, and whose head is so well muffled that it is not easy to gauge its size. The archer appears to be approximately 6½ heads high, which is usual for one of Bruegel’s men. Though Bruegel varied the proportions of his figures to suit the demands of pattern and expressive force, he may frequently have chosen to elongate excessively figures whom he wanted to look Italianate and classicising. In the Adoration, as in Christ carrying the Cross, the elongation of the most important figures could be a concession to a fashion for tall, thin, Italianate figures.

Bruegel’s paintings are so boundlessly full of intriguing incident that it is easy, and indeed important, to speculate about his people. There is a great temptation to fantasise, and perhaps to overinterpret his intentions. In the Adoration, the Child’s pose is reminiscent of that of Lazarus in the Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo in the National Gallery (NG 1). Bruegel is unlikely to have seen Sebastiano’s picture, then in Narbonne Cathedral, but he may have seen in Rome one of Michelangelo’s drawings for the figure of Lazarus. Bruegel may indeed have met Michelangelo and he certainly worked with Giulio Clovio, who owned drawings by Michelangelo. In Bruegel’s Adoration, the Virgin and Joseph are separated by Joseph’s large hat, which he holds to form a barricade between his loins and his wife. She wears a blue mantle that is not exactly a huik, or hooded cloak, but is not unlike the blue huik which, in the centre of Bruegel’s Proverbs (1559: Berlin), the young woman drapes over her elderly husband in a proverbial metaphor of unfaithfulness.⁷⁰ The man whispering to Joseph may be playing on his anxieties over the paternity of the Christ Child. The whisperer is in any case characterised as asinine because of the visual rhymes between his head and the donkey’s behind him.

The colour in the Adoration is unusually sumptuous. Bruegel was normally much less prodigal with his accents of red. In his Christ carrying the Cross (fig. 22), admittedly, the reds of the soldiers’ uniforms guide the eye along, and punctuate, the straggling procession; while Christ, at the geometric centre of the panel, is made still more prominent by the bright blue of his robe. It was once, almost certainly, a more intense blue. In the Adoration, too, some of the reds, pinks and purples are less rich then they once were, before the red lakes began to fade; and the blues would have been brighter and more varied before the smalt became discoloured and the azurite darkened. The greens of Caspar’s robe, Balthasar’s gift and the whispering man’s hat stress the principal diagonal of the composition and would once have echoed the green of the cross, now difficult to discern, on the bearded man’s mantle.

The apparent richness of the textiles and furs may be less impressive than it first appears, not because the pigments have altered in colour but because Bruegel planned such [page 194]discrepancies. Caspar’s ermine, for example, looks so unreal that it comes as a surprise to discover that one of the tails, which seem to have been stencilled, or cut out and stuck onto the fur, has become caught in one of the links of his chain (fig. 25). The classicising ornament on the golden border of Caspar’s jacket is strangely disposed and disciplined only in terms of shapes. The centaur and the youth holding the horn are not axially aligned with each other or with the rest of the figures. Melchior’s sleeve at his right shoulder defies reconstruction and his facial expression is odd. Perhaps he is making clear his awareness of the solemnity of the occasion by shutting or half‐closing his eyes and allowing the corners of his mouth to droop. Even if the kings’ gifts are impressive, their clothes, and Balthasar’s crown, appear a little tawdry.

Surrounded by strangely attired men who present exotic gifts and by their retinue of soldiers, the Child is naked, cold and vulnerable in his shroud‐like cloth (fig. 9). He shrinks away from Caspar’s gift, which is perhaps myrrh, a gum used in medicine and in embalming the dead before burial.⁷¹ He may not be aware of the embroidered(?) ornament on Caspar’s jacket, with its images of pagan beings, nude like himself; he cannot see the gibbet‐like structure that supports the stable behind him. The bearded man on the left looks across at him with evident and grave concern; his mantle is ornamented with a dark green cross, which was perhaps always difficult to decipher.

Very much more sombre in feeling, though not in colour, than the Adoration in a Snowstorm, painted in the previous year, the London Adoration was executed at the same time as the Christ carrying the Cross. The two paintings may have been intended for the same patron, Nicolaas Jongelinck, and to have been hung in close proximity. In the Christ carrying the Cross, there is some comedy, sardonic humour and bitter irony as well as dreadful tragedy. Because very little is known about Jongelinck and nothing about Bruegel’s own beliefs and opinions on matters religious, political or social, we can only speculate on all the contradictions apparent there and in the London Adoration of the Kings. It is a tribute to Bruegel’s genius that we are eager to return, again and again, to wonder about the multiplicity of his meanings.

I am grateful to Joost Vander Auwera, Gabriele Finaldi, Gerlinde Gruber, Karl Schütz, and particularly Iain Buchanan, Christina Currie and Alexander Wied for help in writing this entry.

Notes

Infrared reflectography was carried out using OSIRIS (InGaAs digital sensor). For further details see p. 18, note 23.