122. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, The Drunk Led
Home by his Wife, after 1616. Oil on wood,

40.8 x 64.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal.

 

 

As is indicated by his nickname ‘Hell Brueghel’, Pieter Brueghel the Younger preferred to paint the devilries of ghosts and apparitions painted by his father. Frequently confused with his father, the numerous copies he painted of his father’s works increases this confusion. Like his father, he emphasised the comical side of his subjects, and as Teniers would do later, he sought to integrate unexpected fragments of animals among his figures – birds, mammals, reptiles, and especially amphibians – to obtain the most grotesque combinations possible.

His few surviving paintings, The Fall of the Angels in Brussels, and Christ Carrying the Cross in Berlin and Antwerp, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Winter Landscape in Vienna, reveal examples of his somewhat vulgar talent that, little concerned with inventiveness, was content to follow the easiest path to success.

As remarked by Bode and Woerman, despite his nickname of ‘Hell Brueghel’, Pieter Brueghel the Younger also painted other subjects.[32] The titles of the paintings just cited indicate a certain variety in his work. Moreover, several of the diabolical paintings attributed to him, like Juno in the Underworld and The Temptation of Saint Anthony in Dresden, are actually works from the youth of his brother Jan, who also enjoyed painting in this genre at the beginning of his career.

It was clearly Pieter Brueghel the Younger who painted The Triumph of Death, dated 1597, which hangs in the Gallery of Liechtenstein. In this work, one of the most personal left behind by the artist, the sinister figure of death snatches weapons from the hands of terrified mortals. Violently tearing his victims from their work, pleasure or love, he charges his wagon with their cadavers, its shadow standing out against a smoke-filled and flame-reddened sky.