Pieter Brueghel the Younger

F. Smith Bucknole, Esq.;
By whose estate sold London, Christie's, 22 November 1935, lot 16, to Asscher & Welcker, London;
Private collection, Vienna, 1971;
From whom acquired by the parents of the present owner. 

K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere: Die Gemälde, mit Kritschem Oeuvrekatalog, vol. II, Lingen 1998/2000, p. 822, cat. no. E 1102 and p. 818, reproduced p. 818, fig. 662.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This small panel is in very good condition. The panel is slightly curved but it is made from a single piece of oak which is not reinforced on the reverse and appears never to have split or developed instability. The paint layer is slightly dirty yet there are no restorations visible under ultraviolet light and it is more than likely that there are none. If the picture were to be cleaned, restorations may be required to tidy up some specks around the edges and perhaps a little thinness in the lower foreground. However, this panel is generally very well preserved and in good condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The Drunkard Being Taken Home from the Tavern by His Wife belongs to a group of paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Younger that Ertz has described as "Village Landscapes" (Dorflandschaften).¹ In contrast to the complex paintings that we most often associate with Brueghel, these are more intimate works that illustrate village life in the Netherlands in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. They are often smaller in size than his religious paintings and the figures are reduced in scale, so that the surroundings take on greater importance. 

Of the fifteen versions of The Drunkard Being Taken Home from the Tavern cited by Ertz, the present version is one of only six that he characterizes as certainly by Brueghel and one of only two that is both signed and dated.²  The subject cannot be connected to any extant composition by Bruegel the Elder, and perhaps because of that Brueghel the Younger felt free to make substantial changes from one version to another.  While the central figures of the drunkard and his wife generally remain constant, the figure leading them is sometimes, as here, a girl with an apron, sometimes a boy with a fur hat and sometimes absent altogether.  However, the greatest differences among the versions are in the villages not the figures.  Brueghel based the setting of present work on an etching by Joannes and Lucas Doetecum, A Village Road with a Draw Well (see fig. 1).³  Brueghel turned the nearest building in the etching into an inn and extended the distance from it to the foreground, thus lengthening the journey the drunkard takes on his way home.  There are apparently no other known versions of The Drunkard and His Wife with this same setting,⁴ but Brueghel does draw on it again for the closely related tondo of The Village Street with a Bagpiper.

Brueghel's light touch and his ability to seamlessly incorporate  the examples of his predecessors into his own paintings, as is evidenced here, led to his enormous popularity in his own time and in the present day. 

1.  See Literature, Ertz, pp. 795-831.
2.  Ibid., pp. 822-31.
3.  The etching is itself based on a drawing in reverse by the Master of the Small Landscapes, an artist in the wider circle of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose identity has been much debated.
4.  Unfortunately some of the versions recorded by Ertz, Op. cit., pp. 822-31, are without full descriptions or illustrations.