Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 'The Adoration of the Kings', 1564

The Adoration of the Kings

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Not on display

About the work

Overview

The Virgin sits in front of a dilapidated stable with the naked Christ Child on her knee. Three men offer golden gifts – this is the Adoration of the Kings, a biblical episode imagined as a contemporary event. It’s a chilly winter day: Mary’s dress has fur-lined sleeves and Joseph has a thick-belted robe.

This is one of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s few religious paintings; the upright format and rich colouration suggest it might have been designed as an altarpiece. But its uneasy atmosphere is at odds with a devotional work. The kings are richly dressed but dishevelled, the soldiers menacing, the spectators bewildered or enraged. The crowding, the elongated proportions of the main figures and their nearness to the viewer add to the claustrophobic atmosphere.

What – if anything – this means must remain speculation: we know nothing of Bruegel’s own beliefs and aren't sure who commissioned the painting. His technique, however, is masterly: although seemingly working at great speed every detail is a triumph of design

In-depth

The Virgin Mary sits in front of a dilapidated stable with the naked Christ Child on her knee. Around her, three men offer golden gifts – this is the Adoration of the Kings, imagined as a contemporary event. The Feast of the Adoration is celebrated on 6 January, and this is a chilly winter day: Mary’s dress has fur-lined sleeves; Joseph has a thick-belted robe and holds a hat; and the kings‘ retinue and bystanders are well wrapped up. Although cold, the sun seems to have been shining: the sky was originally blue, and the soldiers’ armour reflects bright light.

This painting’s upright format and rich colouration – some colours have faded, especially the reds, pinks and purples, while the blues would have been brighter and more varied – suggest it might have been designed as an altarpiece. But the sombre atmosphere seems at odds with a devotional work, and many of the figures are almost parodied. Caspar and Melchior, on the left, are richly dressed but strangely dishevelled, with unkempt greasy hair and haggard faces; Balthasar, on the right, has a makeshift crown. The spectators seem either enraged, bewildered or asinine – the hat and profile of the man beside Joseph make an echo of the donkey behind. The threatening band of soldiers bring to mind those who would crucify Christ, while his white cloth resembles a shroud. He seems to cringe away from the kneeling Caspar.

Bruegel seems to have worked at great speed. The ground is irregular in places, perhaps because it was laid on too quickly. The priming was applied so fast that the texture of the brushstrokes is visible through the paint, as is the underdrawing, which was done very quickly following a design worked out in advance. Look closely and you can see where Bruegel made small changes to the position of Balthasar’s boot and to the hand originally on the lid of Melchior’s cup. The paint itself was mostly put on very thinly, but was sometimes impasted or stippled with stiff brushes. Bruegel used brushes to both remove and apply paint, sometimes in a single stroke, and even worked the paint with his fingers. He painted his signature so rapidly that he misspelled his name and had to correct it.

Other paintings allow us to understand how Bruegel composed this extraordinary image and where his ideas came from. His main inspiration was Bosch’s Adoration of the Kings (Prado, Madrid), and he also knew The Adoration of the Kings by Gossaert – look at Caspar’s hat and sceptre and Balthasar’s spurred boot in both. The kings, stable and Virgin and Child had already appeared in Adoration of the Kings in a Snowstorm (Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur), which also has a contemporary setting and is thronged with soldiers. Our painting acted as a source for Bruegel’s sons: the dilapidated stable and some of the main figures reappear in The Adoration of the Kings by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

The feeling of tension and threat sets this painting apart from the others. The crowding, the elongated proportions and small heads of the main figures and their nearness to the viewer all add to the claustrophobic atmosphere. What – if anything – this means must remain speculation: we know nothing of Bruegel’s own beliefs and aren't sure who commissioned the painting, although it was possibly Nicholas Jongelink, a collector who had several works by Bruegel of around the same date. His technique, however, is masterly: every detail is a triumph of design.

Want to find out more?

Delve deeper and explore the catalogue entry for this painting.

Key facts

Details

Full title: The Adoration of the Kings
Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Artist dates: active 1550/1; died 1569
Date made: 1564
Medium and support: oil on wood
Dimensions: 112.1 × 83.9 cm
Inscription summary: Signed; Dated
Acquisition credit: Bought with contributions from the Art Fund and Arthur Serena through the Art Fund, 1920
Inventory number: NG3556
Location: Not on display
Collection: Main Collection
Frame: 16th-century Italian Frame

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’. 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’. 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’. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. It was eventually sold, on 28 July 1894, for 2,500 florins to the wealthy industrialist and armaments manufacturer Georg Roth (1834–1903). Roth lent the picture to the Bruges exhibition of 1902. His elder son Karl Roth sold it to Guido Arnot, evidently in August(?) 1919. Guido Arnot (1878–1946) was a dealer, who handled Egon Schiele’s work and was painted by him.

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’. It was in Zürich in October 1919 and in June 1920(?) was sent, via the British Legation in Bern, to London. After prolonged negotiations, Arnot, who had valued the Adoration at £50,000, agreed on 26 June 1920 to sell it to the National Gallery for £15,000. The Trustees accepted the offer on 21 July 1920.

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.

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. 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.

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’.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Lorne Campbell, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings: With French Paintings before 1600’, London 2014; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2017

Bruegel: Defining a Dynasty

Holburne Museum of Art

11 February 2017 - 4 June 2017
2018

Bruegel

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

2 October 2018 - 13 January 2019

Bibliography

1898

H. Dollmayr, 'Hieronymus Bosch und die Darstellung der Vier Letzten Dinge in der Niederländischen Malerei des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts', Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, XIX, 1898, pp. 284-343
1907

R. Bastelaer and G.H. de Loo, Peter Bruegel l'Ancien, son oeuvre et son temps, Brussels 1907
1921

C.J. Holmes, 'The Adoration of the Kings" by Pieter Brueghel the Elder', The Burlington Magazine, XXXVIII/215, 1921, pp. 53-2
1945

Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: Early Netherlandish School, London 1945
1955

Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: Early Netherlandish School, 2nd edn (revised), London 1955
1955

F. Grossmann, Bruegel. The Paintings, London 1955
1956

M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting: From Van Eyck to Bruegel, ed. F. Grossmann, trans. M. Kay, 1st English edn, London 1956
1969

M. Seidel and R.H. Marijnissen, Bruegel, Stuttgart 1969
1973

F. Grossmann, Pieter Bruegel. Complete Edition of the Paintings, London 1973
1975

R. van Schoute and H. Verougstraete-Marcq, 'Le dessin de peintre (dessin sous-jacent) chez Pierre Bruegel; l'Adoration des Mages de la National Gallery à Londres', Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, XXVI, 1975, pp. 259-67
1982

D. Freedberg, 'The Hidden God: Image and Interdiction in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth Century', Art History, V/2, 1982, pp. 133-53
1987

Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The Early Netherlandish School, 3rd edn, London 1987
1991

G. Grigson, 'The Three Kings of Cologne', History Today, XLI, 1991, pp. 28-34
1994

Y. Pinson, 'Bruegel's 1564 Adoration: Hidden Meanings of Evil in the Figure of the Old King', Artibus et historiae, XV/30, 1994, pp. 109-27
1995

C.J.H.M. Tax, 'Een bijzonder type nef op een schilderij van Pieter Bruegel', Antiek, XXIX/7, 1995, pp. 30-5
1996

L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, 2nd edn, Chicago 1996
1996

Y. Pinson, 'Connotations of Sin and Heresy in the Figure of the Black King in Some Northern Renaissance Adorations', Artibus et historiae, XVII/34, 1996, pp. 159-75
1997

N. Penny, Frames, London 1997
1997

R.C. Trexler, The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of A Christian Story, Princeton 1997
1997

R. Billinge et al., 'Methods and Materials of Northern European Painting in the National Gallery, 1400–1550', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XVIII, 1997, pp. 6-52
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
2001

M.J.G. de Jong, Kerstfeest in De Middeleeuwen: Geschilderd en Geschreven, Louvain 2001
2002

D. Bomford et al., Underdrawings in Renaissance Paintings (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 30 October 2002 - 16 February 2003), London 2002
2002

J. Muller, 'Abandonnez toutes formes d'images: Remarques sur l'iconographie chrétienne de Pieter Bruegel l'Ancien', in R. Recht (ed.), De la puissance de l'image: Les artistes du Nord face à la Réforme, Paris 2002, pp. 167-211
2004

A. Wied, 'Zur Provenienz der "Anbetung der Könige" von Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. in der National Gallery in London', Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, VI-VII, 2004, pp. 250-4
2006

W.S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, Berkeley 2006
2006

H. Devisscher and G. Denhaene, Bruegel, (exh. cat. Kasteel-Museum (Gaasbeek), 2006), Oostkamp 2006
2014

L. Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings: With French Paintings before 1600, 2 vols, London 2014

Frame

This high-quality sixteenth-century cassetta frame from Tuscany, Italy, is carved from walnut wood and highlighted with gold, an effect known as ‘lumeggiato in oro’. The back edge is adorned with carved acanthus-leaf-and-shield motifs, a double pearl-and husk-reel pattern, pearls and a lamb’s-tongue-and-spear motif. The elaborate moulding with a gilt flat top is followed by pearls and rounded dentils highlighted with gold. The moulding descends towards fine carved olives followed by an acanthus-leaf-and-shield motif and ending with a double bead-and-reel pattern at the edge of the flat frieze. Scrolling foliage on the centres and corners of the frieze are painted in gilt oil size. Towards the sight edge are pearls ending in iconic Tuscan flutes.

The frame was bought in the mid-twentieth century and was altered to fit Bruegel’s The Adoration of the Kings.

About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

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