Pen and brown ink, 22.4 × 29.5 cm, signed and dated 1559, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. Hope stands on an anchor in a stormy sea, among shipwrecks, a burning house, prisoners in a tower, fishermen — the virtue defined by what needs it; the grimmest of the Virtues and the finest of the Berlin sheets.

Pen and brown ink, 22.5 × 29.5 cm, signed and dated 1559, Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels. Justice, blindfolded with sword and scales, stands in a field of punishment: the rack, the strappado, the wheel, the gallows, the block, the stake, a man being broken, a trial in progress — the most complete image of sixteenth-century penal practice that exists, and the most disturbing of the Virtues. The caption, in the print, praises the law's severity as the protection of the good.

Pen and brown ink, 22.4 × 29.8 cm, signed and dated 1559, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Prudence, a woman with a sieve on her head and a mirror and a coffin at her feet, stands in a village where everyone is providing for the winter: salting meat, storing grain, putting out a fire, repairing a house, caring for the sick — the Virtues' method of showing a virtue by a whole village's labour.

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel, published by Cock, 1559; Musea Brugge. A quack surgeon cuts the 'stone of folly' from the heads of a crowd of fools in the village of Mallegem — 'Foolstown' — a Bosch subject (the Prado Extraction of the Stone) made into a village fair, with the caption inviting all fools to come for the cure. One of the richest of the comic prints.

The sheet

Pen and brown ink, 26.5 × 39.4 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL 1559 — Courtauld Gallery, London (Seilern bequest). The design for the engraving of the Kermis of Hoboken published by Bartholomeus de Momper in 1559 — the first of Bruegel's village-festival compositions, and the origin of the kermis genre.

The scene

The village of Hoboken, south of Antwerp, on its feast-day: a procession with a banner leaves the church at the right; an archery contest is held at the left; a play is performed on a stage; peasants dance round a tree, drink at the inn, watch a procession of fools, play games, urinate against walls; the village's streets are full of small groups, each a complete anecdote; a banner with the guild's emblem hangs from the inn. The viewpoint is high and the field is the Proverbs'.

The kermis

The kermis — the church's dedication feast, a village holiday of procession, drinking, dancing and games — was the Netherlandish festival par excellence, and Bruegel's Hoboken was the first picture to make it a subject; the Kermis of St George print followed, and the Wedding Dance and Peasant Dance panels are its descendants. The print's caption offered a moral ('the peasants rejoice at such festivals... though they be fasting and poor'); the drawing offers the village.

The drawing

The sheet is a finished design with the composition complete for the engraver; the pen is Bruegel's early print-design manner — small, even, hooked strokes, figures in outline with a few strokes of shading. It is among the best-preserved of his print-designs and one of the few signed and dated.

History

Seilern's collection; the Courtauld since 1978, where it hangs with the museum's two Bruegel paintings.

What to look at

The procession with the banner; the archery; the dancers round the tree; the play on its stage; the fools' procession; the signature and date.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, Cock, 1559–60. The seven works of mercy in a village; from the Rotterdam drawing.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, published by Cock, 1559–60. The print from the Rijksmuseum drawing: Faith among the sacraments in a church. Galle's engraving of the Virtues is finer and more tonal than Van der Heyden's of the Sins, and the series marks Galle's emergence as Cock's best engraver.

Pen and brown ink, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. A village with a church tower among trees — a Brabant landscape without mountains, of the kind that the Months would transform. One of the few drawn landscapes of the Antwerp years after the Alpine series; its attribution is accepted by the Berlin cabinet.

Pen and brown ink, 22.5 × 29.5 cm, signed and dated 1560, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Fortitude, an armoured woman with an anvil on her head, leads an army of angels against a horde of demons and the seven vices in beast-form — the Virtues' one return to the Boschian battle, and the design nearest the Fall of the Rebel Angels of 1562.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, Cock, 1560. The angels' battle with the vices; from the Rotterdam drawing.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, Cock, 1559–60. Hope on her anchor in the storm; from the Berlin drawing.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, Cock, 1559–60; Metropolitan Museum impression. The field of punishment from the Brussels drawing; the most reproduced of the Virtues and the source of a whole literature on Bruegel and the law.

Etching with engraving, 22.3 × 29.1 cm, signed in the plate and dated 1560, published by Cock; Fondation Custodia, Paris (recorded on Wikidata as a painting in error). Bruegel's only print by his own hand: a hunter with a crossbow stalks rabbits on a hillside above a river valley with a castle, while a second man with a spear creeps up behind him — 'the hunter hunted'. The etched line is Bruegel's own pen translated to copper, and the landscape is the Alpine-Brabant composite of the Months five years early.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, Cock, 1559–60. The village providing for winter; from the Brussels drawing.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, Cock, 1560; Musea Brugge, Ashmolean and Royal Library impressions. The liberal arts at work; from the Rotterdam drawing. The last of the seven and the one most reprinted as an image of the Renaissance's learning.

Pen and brown ink, 22.5 × 29.5 cm, signed and dated 1560, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Temperance, with a clock on her head and a bridle in her mouth, stands among the liberal arts at work — astronomers measuring the globe, musicians, a choir, scholars, an actor's stage, painters, surveyors — the most intellectual of the Virtues and a portrait of the Antwerp of Ortelius and Plantin.

Etching and engraving, 21.4 × 29.2 cm, 1560; National Gallery of Art, Washington. A second impression of the Rabbit Hunt etching — the Washington museum's record under its own title. The print exists in two states; this is the only work in which Bruegel's hand can be seen in a printed line, and impressions are rare.

Pen and brown ink, 20.6 × 14.6 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington. A single seated bagpiper, cheeks blown, in a peasant's cap — the figure who would sit at the Wedding and the Dance. The sheet's attribution is disputed: it may belong to the naer het leven group that Mielke gave to Roelant Savery, or to a follower; Washington keeps the Bruegel name with a query.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, Cock, c. 1562; Metropolitan Museum impression. The upright Resurrection from the Rotterdam drawing, with the sleeping soldiers and the Marys; Galle's finest plate after Bruegel.

Pen and brush in brown ink on paper, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The design for Philips Galle's engraving: Christ rises from the tomb among sleeping and waking soldiers, with the three Marys arriving at the left and the angel on the stone — an upright composition, unusual for Bruegel, with the soldiers in the foreground in the armour of the Massacre's troops. The drawing is among the most finished sheets and was clearly prepared for the engraver.

Engraving by Frans Huys after Bruegel, 22.8 × 29.6 cm, published by Cock, c. 1561–65; Musea Brugge. One of the series of ten (or eleven) Sailing Vessels engraved by Huys after Bruegel's drawings — warships and merchantmen under sail, rendered with a mariner's exactness of rigging; the series was the sixteenth century's best set of ship-portraits and the evidence of Bruegel's Antwerp education in the harbour. Some plates carry small mythological scenes (the fall of Icarus, Daedalus) in the sky or the sea.

Pen and brown ink, 22.3 × 28.9 cm, signed and dated 1565, Albertina, Vienna. The design for the first of the Four Seasons prints published by Cock (engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, 1570): a formal garden being dug, raked and planted by gardeners under a lady's direction, with sheep-shearing and a May feast beyond — the labours of March, April and May in a single composition. The sheet is the best evidence for what the lost spring panel of the Months may have contained in its foreground.

The record for Bruegel's two surviving designs — Spring (Albertina, 1565) and Summer (Hamburg, 1568) — for the Four Seasons series of prints that Cock's widow published in 1570, with Autumn and Winter designed by Hans Bol after Bruegel's death. The two sheets are catalogued separately; together they document the last print project of Bruegel's life and the form in which the calendar idea of the Months was returned to the print market.

The sheet

Pen and brown ink, 25.5 × 21.5 cm — Albertina, Vienna. The most famous of Bruegel's drawings and the only image that has ever been taken as his self-portrait: a painter, bearded, shaggy-haired, in a cap, holding a brush and looking past the viewer with a frown of concentration or contempt, while behind his shoulder a bespectacled man in a fur hat peers at the unseen picture with his mouth open and his hand on his purse.

The two men

The painter is the artist as the sixteenth century imagined him: unkempt, intense, absorbed; the buyer is the connoisseur as the artist imagined him: myopic, gaping, reaching for his money. The drawing's joke — the maker who sees and the buyer who cannot — is the humanist joke about the Kunstkenner that Erasmus and the emblem-books made, and the drawing has been read as Bruegel's statement on his own patrons. Whether the painter is Bruegel has been argued since the seventeenth century: the print series of artists' portraits after Lampsonius shows a Bruegel with a similar beard, but that portrait may itself derive from this drawing, and the face is more a type than a likeness. The Albertina's view is that the sheet is an allegory, not a portrait.

The drawing

The pen is fine, the hatching controlled, the two heads modelled with a draughtsman's care that is unusual in Bruegel's surviving drawings, most of which are landscape or print-design; the drawing was not made for engraving — it was not engraved until the eighteenth century — and seems to have been a private sheet. Several copies exist, which attest to its fame in the seventeenth century.

History

In the Albertina's founding collection; the Vienna cabinet since; the sheet is the museum's most requested Bruegel and has been the face on the cover of a hundred books.

What to look at

The painter's eye and frown; the brush; the buyer's spectacles and his hand on the purse; the hatching of the beard. Then decide whether it is a face or a type.

Engraving by Philips Galle after Bruegel, published by Cock, 1565; Musea Brugge. The Good Shepherd stands in the door of the fold while thieves break in over the walls and a hireling flees — John 10, the parable of the door; the only engraving after Bruegel with a Gospel subject made in the Brussels years, and a composition whose thieves recall the Nest Robber.

Engraving by Lucas and Joannes van Doetecum after Bruegel (or after a follower), published by Cock, c. 1565; Musea Brugge. A fowler with nets and decoys in a landscape; the attribution of the design to Bruegel is not certain — the Doetecum brothers engraved many landscapes 'in the Bruegel manner' — and the print documents the demand for his name on the landscape market.

Pen and brown ink, 22 × 28.6 cm, signed and dated 1568, Hamburger Kunsthalle. The second of the Four Seasons designs: a field of reapers with scythes and sickles, a man drinking from a jug with his head thrown back in the foreground — the Harvesters' motifs redrawn at close range, with the figures larger and the land smaller; the drinker's pose, seen from below, has been compared to the late figures of Michelangelo. The last dated drawing by Bruegel.

Pen and brown ink, 20.3 × 30.9 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. Three beekeepers in hooded wicker masks carry hives across a yard while a boy climbs a tree behind them to rob a nest; the inscription, in a later hand, gives the proverb 'he who knows where the nest is has the knowledge, he who robs it has the nest' — the saying of the Vienna Nest Robber of the same year. The masked figures' anonymity has made the sheet, in the political reading, an image of the Netherlands' faceless informers; it is also simply the strangest of Bruegel's drawings, and one of the finest.

The picture

Oil on panel, 67.5 × 100 cm — private collection. A world-landscape with a sea, ships and a distant city, in which Christ appears to the apostles on the shore; attributed to Bruegel as an early work of c. 1553 on the basis of its relation to the Large Landscapes and the Sower, and listed on Wikidata as his. The attribution is not accepted by the major catalogues — Sellink does not include it; the 2018 exhibition did not show it — and it is placed here among the doubtful works.

The composition

The picture has the structure of the early world-landscapes — a high bank, a wide water, a far coast, a sacred subject reduced to small figures — and its seascape with ships has been connected to the Messina drawing and the Doria Naval Battle; the handling, however, is harder and the figures stiffer than Bruegel's, and a follower working from the prints is the likelier author.

What it shows

Whatever its authorship, the panel documents the market for the 'Bruegel landscape' in the generation after the prints: a world-landscape with a Gospel scene in the corner, of the kind Cock's publications had made fashionable.

Pen and brown ink on paper, 26 × 41.5 cm, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. A wooded landscape with pilgrims on a path, recorded as a drawing by Bruegel (Wikidata's 'painting' type and 1540 date are errors); the attribution is not accepted by Mielke's catalogue, which places the sheet among the landscapes in the Bruegel manner by followers. It is kept here among the doubtful works.

Oil on panel, 85 × 157 cm, art collection of the Federal Republic of Germany (on loan from the post-war Munich Central Collecting Point holdings). A reduced copy of the Vienna Procession to Calvary, of the kind produced in quantity by Pieter the Younger's workshop and others in the early seventeenth century; Wikidata's record under the father's name and its 1550 date are errors. The panel's history — through the art trade of the Third Reich into the federal holdings — is the typical one for a 'Brueghel' of this rank.

Oil on panel, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. A copy of the Vienna Carnival and Lent of 1559, recorded by the Danish museum as after Bruegel and on Wikidata under his name with a 1555 placeholder date; one of several versions by Pieter the Younger's workshop and followers. The Copenhagen collection's Flemish pictures came largely from the Danish royal Kunstkammer, which acquired 'Brueghels' in the seventeenth century as Rudolf II did, but less discriminatingly.