VII. Brussels, 1563–1569: the Months, the peasants, and the last pictures

Van Mander gives the reason for the move to Brussels with the relish of a gossip: Bruegel had been living in Antwerp with a servant girl whom he would have married, 'except that she lied too much'; he made a pact with her to cut a notch in a stick for every lie, and when the stick was full he left her; and when he courted Mayken Coecke, her mother Mayken Verhulst made it a condition that he leave Antwerp and the girl behind. Whatever the truth, the marriage took place in Notre-Dame de la Chapelle in 1563, and for the remaining six years of his life Bruegel lived in Brussels — the seat of the regent's court, the city of Coecke's old connections, a smaller, older, more official place than Antwerp, forty miles away. The sons were born there: Pieter in 1564, Jan in 1568.

The patronage changed. In Antwerp he had painted for merchants; in Brussels he painted for the very rich and the very well connected. The Antwerp financier Nicolaes Jonghelinck, brother of the sculptor Jacques, owned sixteen Bruegels by 1566 — a Tower of Babel, a Procession to Calvary, and the series of the Months — hung in his suburban house, Ter Beken, outside the city walls, alongside Frans Floris's Labours of Hercules and Liberal Arts. Cardinal Granvelle, the king's minister and the most hated man in the Netherlands before his recall in 1564, owned Bruegels too, including the little Flight into Egypt of 1563, and pursued them after his departure. The Antwerp mint-master Jean Noirot had several at his bankruptcy in 1572. Abraham Ortelius owned the Death of the Virgin. The Brussels city council is said by Van Mander to have commissioned, at the very end, a series on the digging of the Brussels-Antwerp canal, never completed. These are the owners of a painter at the top of the market, and the pictures of the Brussels years are on a corresponding scale of ambition.

The Months are the centre. In 1565 Bruegel painted for Jonghelinck a cycle of the year — six panels, most scholars now believe, each covering two months, of which five survive: The Gloomy Day (February–March), The Hay Harvest (June–July, Prague), The Harvesters (August–September, New York), The Return of the Herd (October–November), and The Hunters in the Snow (December–January); the sixth, spring, is lost. They descend from the calendar pages of illuminated books of hours — the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry is the grandest ancestor — in which each month's labour was shown beneath its zodiac sign. Bruegel kept the labours and discarded the calendar. What he painted was the weather: the raw brown-grey of late winter with the ships breaking up on the estuary; the yellow-green of early summer with its hay and its cherries; the heat of August, the reapers asleep under the pear tree, the wheat like a wall of gold; the russet of autumn with the cattle coming down from the hills under a stormy sky; the white and grey-green of the deep frost. Nobody had painted the seasons as light and air before, and the Months stand at the head of a tradition that runs to Constable and Monet. They are also, all five, built on one structure — the high near foreground at the left, the plunge to the valley, the far mountains (imported from the Alps into a Brabant that has none) — so that hung together around a room, as at Ter Beken, they made a single panoramic year.

Alongside the Months the Brussels years produced the religious panels in which Bruegel set the sacred story in a Flemish present: The Procession to Calvary (1564), in which Christ carrying the cross is one small figure lost in a crowd of five hundred streaming across a landscape toward the execution ground, with the mourning Virgin and St John in the old-fashioned style of Van der Weyden isolated in the foreground like a quotation; The Census at Bethlehem (1566), in which the Holy Family arrives in a snowbound Brabant village to register for a tax, under the Habsburg eagle painted on the inn's wall; The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1566–67, Royal Collection, with a second version in Vienna), in which Herod's soldiers are a troop of Spanish-Habsburg cavalry and German Landsknechts sacking a Flemish village in the snow — a painting whose later owner, Rudolf II, had the slaughtered babies overpainted as bundles, geese and animals, so that the picture in Windsor is today a looting rather than a massacre, its original subject visible only in the Vienna copy and in infrared; The Sermon of St John the Baptist (1566, Budapest), a crowd in a forest clearing, listening, of the kind that was gathering for the Calvinist hedge-preachers that summer across Flanders; The Conversion of Paul (1567), an army crossing the Alps with the blinded saint a small figure on the ground; The Adoration of the Kings (1564, London), his one large upright, close-up and harsh, with a Joseph being whispered to and a soldier staring at the gold.

These pictures were painted during the years of the Netherlands' crisis: the iconoclastic fury of August 1566, when Calvinist mobs smashed the images in Antwerp's churches; the arrival of the Duke of Alba with ten thousand Spanish troops in August 1567; the Council of Troubles, and the executions of Egmont and Hornes in the Grand-Place of Brussels in June 1568, a few hundred yards from Bruegel's house. That Bruegel's Massacre shows soldiers in the Habsburg colours sacking a Flemish village, that the Census shows the Habsburg eagle over a tax office, that the Magpie on the Gallows shows a gallows — these facts have launched a whole literature reading the late Bruegel as a coded partisan of the revolt. The literature is seductive and should be resisted in its strong form. The Massacre is dated by most scholars to 1565–67, before Alba arrived; Granvelle collected the painter; the Census belongs to a tradition of winter Nativities; Bruegel's patrons were men who prospered under the regime. What is undeniable is the tone: a steadily darkening sense, from the Months onward, of the human crowd as something blind, driven and doomed, which the last pictures make explicit.

VIII. The peasant pictures and the last year

Van Mander's most famous passage describes Bruegel and the merchant Hans Franckert going in disguise to peasant weddings and kermises 'pretending to be of the bride's or groom's family', bringing presents, and observing 'the peasants in eating, drinking, dancing, jumping, making love and other amusements'. Whether or not it happened, it accounts for the pictures that made the painter's popular name: The Wedding Dance (1566, Detroit), The Peasant Wedding and The Peasant Dance (both c. 1567–68, Vienna), and the small late panels of single figures. The first shows a whirl of dancers in a clearing — codpieces, swung skirts, a hundred and twenty-five figures; the second, a wedding feast in a barn against a wall of stacked sheaves, with the bride sitting alone under a paper crown, smug and oblivious, while two men carry a door loaded with bowls of porridge and a child in a too-large cap licks a plate; the third, a village dance under an inn sign, a bagpiper, a running couple rushing into the picture from the right, a kiss, a fight brewing.

The argument about these pictures is the central argument about Bruegel. The older view — codified by Van Mander and still visible in every museum gift shop — is that they are comic: Peasant Bruegel showing his boerkens at their drunken revels for the amusement of the town. The modernist view, inaugurated by Max Dvořák and Charles de Tolnay in the 1920s and 30s, turned this on its head: the peasants are humanity, seen with a stoic's detachment, and the painter is a philosopher. The post-war iconologists (Stridbeck, 1956) made them moral exempla — gluttony, lust, anger, the sins of the flesh in a bagpipe-driven pandemonium, painted for an audience of bourgeois who knew the sermons. And the social historians and the 'ethnographers' of the 1980s and 1990s (Svetlana Alpers, Margaret Sullivan, Walter Gibson) have argued back and forth over whether the paintings show contempt, curiosity, sympathy, or the detached recording instinct of a humanist age that also produced costume books and descriptions of the Indies. The pictures themselves are more interesting than any of these readings, because they contain all of them. The bagpiper in the Wedding is painted with the tenderness of a man who has watched a hungry musician look at a bowl of soup; the kissing couple in the Dance are grotesque; the bride is absurd; the child with the plate is one of the most loved figures in European painting. Bruegel does not judge his peasants; he does not exempt them from the judgement; he looks, with an attention so total that the looking itself becomes the meaning.

The last pictures — 1568, the year before the death — change scale and change temperature. The Peasant and the Nest Robber (Vienna) sets a grinning peasant pointing over his shoulder at a boy stealing a nest, while he himself is about to step into a brook: the proverb about the man who knows where the nest is and the man who robs it, painted almost life-size with a plump, ungainly, advancing figure that fills the panel. The Magpie on the Gallows (Darmstadt), which Van Mander says he left to his wife, puts a gallows in a paradisal landscape with peasants dancing beneath it and a magpie — the gossip, the informer — perched on the crossbar; Van Mander says he meant by it 'the gossips he would deliver to the gallows', and it is the closest thing to a personal statement he left. The Misanthrope (Naples, on linen): a hooded old man in black walking away from the world, with a hunched thief in a glass globe cutting his purse — 'Because the world is so faithless, I go into mourning'. The Beggars (Louvre), five cripples in paper crowns and foxtails, the smallest and most terrible. The Three Soldiers (Frick), a grisaille of Landsknechts. And The Blind Leading the Blind (Naples, on linen): six blind men roped in a chain, the leader already in the ditch, each face a clinically distinct pathology of the eye, crossing a meadow in front of a church, under a sky of extraordinary tenderness — the painting in which the steady darkening of the Brussels years reaches its end, and the crowd of all the earlier pictures is reduced to a line of men falling one after another into the same ditch.

Bruegel died on 9 September 1569 — the date is on the epitaph his sons placed in the Chapelle. Van Mander says that on his deathbed he had his wife burn certain drawings 'with very sharp and biting inscriptions', either from remorse or from fear that they would bring her trouble — a sentence that has fed the political reading for four hundred years and that, like everything in Van Mander, may be true. He was perhaps forty-three. He had painted for about fifteen years.