Jan Breughel the Younger Antwerp 1601 - 1678

Other animal sketches, also on small panels thinly washed over with gesso grounds, are to be found in the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625): see, for example, the two small panels with Sketches of donkeys, monkeys, cats and dogs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. nos. 6985 & 6988; K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere, Cologne 1979, pp. 392-3, cat. nos. 311 and 312, reproduced figs. 465 and 466). Their function was most likely to serve as models for the animals he would later insert into his larger compositions. The two Vienna paintings have been dated to circa 1616 and it is likely that this was working practice in Brueghel's studio at the time. The present sketch, painted by the Younger Breughel heavily under the influence of his father, was most likely produced prior to his italian journey of circa 1620. There exists a closely related sketch, also of Three head studies of a roebuck, which Foucart ascribed to Jan Brueghel the Elder but which Ertz correctly assigns to the Younger, in the Musée d'Art et d'Historie, Narbonne (see Ertz, under Literature, p. 501, cat. no. 330, reproduced). Both that and the present work appear to have been strongly inspired by the deer in the Elder Brueghel's painting of The Vision of St. Hubert, a collaborative work with Rubens known in two variants; one in Berlin and one in Madrid (reproduced in Ertz, op. cit., 1979, p. 395, figs. 468 and 469 respectively). Jan Breughel the Younger would later adapt the deer from his father's painting of St. Hubert for his own interpretation of the subject, today in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (ibid., p. 395, fig. 470).