PIETER BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER

The Swan Inn: peasants feasting and merrymaking in a village street

Signed lower right: P BREVGHEL Oil on panel: 17 ¼ x 24 in / 43.7 x 62.7 cm Painted circa 1625

Pieter Brueghel the Younger was the elder son of the famed Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525/30-1569), the hugely innovative creator of peasant scenes and landscapes. Pieter II became the conduit for the dissemination of his father’s oeuvre through his copies of many of his father’s most celebrated works.

In his later career Pieter II developed his own lively compositions of peasant life. With wry humour, Brueghel here depicts a village feast which is spiralling gently out of control. The tipsy revellers call for more beer: as fast as it is produced from the inn cellar, an empty jug is sent back to be refilled. The foreground drama is provided by a pair of couples. A man and a woman lock eyes in an expression of woozy affection, while their more sober partners restrain them, arousing curiosity about the true relationships of these neighbours and friends. Down the long village street are more incidents – an escaped pig, a remonstrating couple and a fight breaking out. The village dogs are having no end of a good time, running about and barking at all this chaos. The village church in the background is a reminder that the licence of Carnival and other feasts was an exception to the everyday world of hard work and piety, a necessary letting-off of steam in the ordered agricultural year. However, as always with Pieter II, enjoyment of peasant joie de vivre softens any moral overtones.

A still life of a rummer of white wine, a silver-gilt-mounted knife, a gilt-brass clockwatch with a blue ribbon and pewter plates with olives and a peeled lemon on a ledge

Signed and dated lower left: HEDA 1629 . Oil on panel: 13 ¼ x 21 ¾ in / 33.7 x 55.2 cm

The Haarlem painter Heda transformed the Dutch still life from the widely spaced arrangements and bright local colours of exponents such as Floris van Dijck (1575-1651), to develop the ‘monochrome ontbijtje’ or ‘breakfast piece’. Heda began painting still lifes in the mid-1620s, but it was only at the end of the decade that he adopted a lower, more intimate viewpoint in his compositions, unifying the objects by means of tonal affinities. Set against a plain, gentlyshadowed grey-green background, a meal is placed on a stone ledge. Grey, silver and pewter tones ripple across the panel, intercut with touches of gold: the reflection of sunlight through the studio window in the rummer, the gilt-brass clockwatch and the curl of the cut lemon peel. The blue ribbon of the clockwatch’s winding key provides a bright element of contrasting colour in the foreground.

Heda often included high-status objects in his still lifes, here the clockwatch and knife. The clockwatch dates from c.1600-1620: its stackfreed movement, visible in Heda’s meticulous delineation, indicates that it was made in south Germany, probably Nuremberg or Augsburg. Clockwatches of this date would have cost multiples of a workman’s annual wage. They were showy toys for the rich, striking the hours, but woefully inaccurate. Heda lavishes painterly care on the intricate steel and gilt-brass case, the most glamorous object in the still life. Also of German origin is the elegant, agate-handled knife, mounted with silver-gilt, used to peel the lemon.