Headlong (5 page)

There are some paintings in the history of art that break free, just as some human beings do, from the confines of the particular little world into which they were born. They leave home – they escape from the tradition in which they were formed, and which seemed at first to give them significance. They step out of their own time and place, and find some kind of universal and enduring fame. They become part of the common currency of names and images and stories that a whole culture takes for granted.

It happens for good reason and for bad, and for no discernible reason at all. It’s always happened, even before the age of the rotary press and colour photography. It happened with one faintly smiling Tuscan woman, one greatly amused Dutchman. It happened with a vase of Provençal sunflowers and a couple tenderly embraced in a marble kiss. It was happening already in classical antiquity, with a statue by Praxiteles of the Aphrodite of Cnidus. But now that images can be reproduced so easily and so accurately, now that mass tourism and universal education have filled the great galleries of the world with holidaymakers and schoolchildren, now that you can buy a painting and send your greetings home on the back of it for the price of the stamp you stick on it, some of these images have become even more pervasive.

One of the most familiar of all is a landscape by Bruegel, sometimes known as
The Return of the Hunters
, more usu
ally as
The Hunters in the Snow
. There they go again, those weary men with their gaunt dogs, on the walls of hospital waiting-rooms and students’ lodgings, on your mantelpiece Christmas after Christmas, trudging away from us off the winter hills behind our backs, down into the snowbound valley beneath. Their heads are lowered, their spoils are meagre. Three hunters, with thirteen dogs to feed and nothing but a single fox to show for their labours. There’s no great rejoicing at their return; the women making a fire, outside the inn with the sign that’s hanging half off its hooks, don’t give them a glance, any more than the ploughman looks up to see Icarus vanishing into the sea in that earlier painting of Bruegel’s that Auden made almost as famous as the
Hunters
. What takes the eye is the landscape that opens away at the foot of the hill we are on: the village turned in upon itself by the cold, the tiny figures on the unfamiliar ice, the sky leaden above the white flood plain around the frozen river, a planing magpie black against the whiteness, leading the eye on to the broken teeth of the mountains on the other side of the valley, and the distant town at the end of it beside the winter sea.

You realize, from all this remembered detail, what an impression the painting has made on me. But I don’t really remember all that much of the detail. What I remember is the wintriness. I can body it out like this because I’m sitting in the café of the National Gallery, looking at reproductions of it in the various illustrated books on Bruegel I’ve managed to buy in the bookshop here and in various other shops I went to on the way from St Pancras. There’s one thing about the picture, though, that the reproductions fail to represent: the haunting
presence
that the original has when you stand in front of it.

It’s in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, a solemn
palace erected in the most grandiloquent years of nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary to enshrine the imperial picture collection. The paintings are on the
piano nobile
, and you humbly climb to present yourself to them by way of a staircase huge enough to fetch you almost to your knees by the time you get to the top. The size of the
Hunters
matches its setting. The reproductions I’ve bought lie propped on the table in front of me, inches wide by inches high, and I look down upon them as I would upon specimens in a laboratory. The original hangs at eye-level and above, nearly four feet high by over five feet across, the size of a window, so that you’re looking out into a complete world beyond the wall. You’re drawn out of yourself, out of the warm and comfortable world you inhabit, and you’re taken into a harsh cold place in a more precarious time, where the warmth of the domestic hearth, and the store of food saved from the harvest, are intimately precious. You’re enfolded in the great stillness of that snowbound valley; surrounded by the strange muffled quietness of the day; brought before the throne of winter.

And it has a context. When you find yourself at last before the
Hunters
, as I did on a hot summer’s afternoon seven years ago, having another of my life-changing
coups de
foudre
, you’re not looking at this one work alone. Turn your head, and there are Bruegels on every wall; you’re in a room which contains about a third of all his known paintings, a room in which every gilt frame is a window looking out on to a different aspect of his world. On the end wall to your left are views almost as familiar as the one in front of you. Outside one gilt window is the great Tower of Babel, its head in the clouds, listing like the Tower of Pisa as its foundations sink under the weight of its galleried masonry. Beyond the next window the eager crowds stream out of a little walled
Flemish town on a brisk spring day, on their way to Calvary to watch what promises to be a highly enjoyable triple crucifixion, turning with wide-eyed fascination as they realize that the principal performers are travelling alongside them, the two thieves gratifyingly white faced with terror in the tumbril, Christ on foot, piquantly collapsing beneath the weight of his cross. From the windows behind and to the right you can see the familiar, brutally charmless little brats at their
Children’s Games
; the familiar cross-section of rural society celebrating
The Wedding Banquet
; the familiar peasants guzzling and wagering and clumping at their al fresco
Dance
; the familiar squadron of armed horsemen waiting in a forest of raised pikes as their colleagues rampage through the snowbound Flemish village at Herod’s paranoiac command, slaughtering all the male children.

Now turn back to the
Hunters
. On the same wall are two more landscapes of almost exactly the same size, but slightly less familiar. Immediately to the left of the
Hunters
is another river valley, not the same one but evidently in the same part of the world, once again seen from the high ground above it, once again lined with mountain crags, but caught this time on a serene day in autumn, with the leaves russet on the trees and the grapes in the vineyards ready for harvesting. Going away down the hillside in front of us this time are not hunters but herdsmen, driving cows fat from their summer pasturage in the mountains back to the valley for the harsh winter predicted by the
Hunters
. Then to the left of
The Return of the Herd
is a third river valley in this same mountain kingdom, still seen from above, still overlooked by sheer rockfalls. Now we’re in different weather – a blustery day at the very beginning of spring, with torn dark clouds racing across the sky and ships in trouble on the wide estuary. The peasants immediately in front of us this
time are pollarding the trees before the first spring growth appears. The hillside beneath them, and the streets of the little village straggling up it, have been turned into raw mud slides by the late winter rains. A little mudhole of a place, in fact, in spite of the wide views, particularly (as the title tells us) on
The Gloomy Day
when we happen to visit it.

The three pictures are plainly related to each other, and there are two more in the same series which have become separated from them. If you go to the National Gallery in Prague – or turn over the page of your Bruegel book, as I’m doing now – you find yourself looking down on a fourth river and up to a fourth lot of precipitous cliffs. This time it’s a brilliant summer’s day, and we’re further back from the valley, on more level ground, watching the
Haymaking
. Away from us once again, back to the village below, go peasants weighed down with baskets full of the produce of high summer, cherries and beans. And if you turn over once again, or go to the Metropolitan Museum next time you’re in New York, you’re looking out over a fifth valley. The country here is gentler, the weather hotter. There are no high mountains, and only a flash of the river as it joins the calm and busy sea. You’re in
The Corn Harvest
, at noon on a day in the great heat of summer, when the men are laying the ripe wheat to sheaves and stooks, or sprawled asleep in the shade of a tree, and the women are cutting great loaves for the midday break.

Each of these five pictures (with the exception of
Haymaking
, which seems to be missing three or four centimetres at the bottom) is signed and dated. They were painted in the space of a single year, 1565, and a single year passes in the course of them. They show the four seasons, each characterized by its ever-returning round of rural labours and weathers.
The Gloomy Day
is plainly set in spring,
The
Return of the Herd
in autumn, and
The Hunters in the Snow
in winter. But between spring and autumn an oddity creeps into the scheme: we have not one but two pictures,
Haymaking
and
The Corn Harvest
, that represent summer.

Four seasons – five pictures.

Well, why not? It’s not unreasonable to have two different scenes from the pleasantest time of year. But even within this lopsided framework the pictures are oddly distributed.
The Hunters
, to judge by the weather, shows us the deepest point of deep midwinter, perhaps some time in January. By the time of
The Gloomy Day
we’ve moved forwards only to the first days of spring – the tail-end of winter, really, before any of the conventional signs of spring have appeared. Early March, perhaps – only a month or so later than the preceding scene – and leaving a gap of nearly three months before the first of the two summer pictures, since they can’t possibly be haymaking before June at the earliest.

What this odd bunching suggests is that there are not too many pictures but too few. There seems to be something missing.

My fate in life now turns out to hang upon exactly what it is.

Although the pictures appear to show four different seasons, and although the series is often referred to as
The Seasons
, there’s no evidence that they were intended in that way at all. The only documentary hint we have about their origins is a reference in 1566, the year after they were painted, when they’re listed among the pictures owned by an Antwerp merchant called Nicolaes Jongelinck. They appear under a collective heading, without further differentiation, not as
The
Seasons
, but as
De Twelff maenden – The Twelve Months
. If this is right, though, and the five pictures represent not four subjects but twelve, then there’s even
more
missing.

How much more? According to the list, Jongelinck owned sixteen paintings by Bruegel, of which, apart from
De Twelff maenden
, only two are named,
The Tower of Babel
and
The Procession to Calvary
. So the list includes fourteen unnamed pictures. At least five of these, the five we still have, must be part of the
Twelve Months
series; perhaps all fourteen are, or any number in between. Fourteen pictures to illustrate twelve months seems an even stranger anomaly than we started with, and most of the other intervening possibilities aren’t any better. The most plausible division of the list, on the face of it, is two unspecified paintings and twelve paintings illustrating one month each.

In that case no fewer than seven of the series have been lost, which by Lady Bracknell’s standards might seem like quite egregious carelessness. But it’s perfectly possible. The
Netherlands were in turmoil by the end of Bruegel’s life as they subsided into eighty years of war fought to throw off Spanish domination. Only forty-five authenticated paintings by Bruegel are extant, and we know that there must have been others because we have the copies and engravings that his followers made of them.

But whether there really are seven paintings missing from the series, or nine, or six, or five, or four, no one seems to know. I’m sitting now in the Reading Room of the London Library, my back firmly turned upon the green haze on the trees in St James’s Square outside the window, speed-reading the seven standard authorities on Bruegel that I’ve assembled on my table, before I rush back to St Pancras to keep my pledge to make dinner for Kate. The more I read, the more uncertain everything about him seems to become. The uncertainty fills me with a terrible anguish. I need to know exactly what’s missing. I really do.

Scarcely anything about him has survived, I discover, apart from some unknown proportion of the pictures themselves and a handful of dates from official records. He was admitted to the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1551. From 1552 to 1554 he was on his travels to Italy. In 1563 he moved to Brussels and married the daughter of his former master. In 1569 he died. How old he was when this cryptic story ended no one knows, because no one knows when it started. Scholars have found various scraps of evidence that suggest he was born some time between 1525 and 1530, but can’t exclude 1522, or even 1520.

There are two engraved portraits of him, according to the inscriptions on them, one by Lampsonius, the other by Sadeler. But no letters, and no certain firsthand recollections. Almost the only source of biographical information about him is an extraordinary work called the
Schilder
-
Boeck
, the Book of Painters. The author was a painter himself, Karel van Mander, and the book is a
Brief Lives
of European artists from antiquity onwards, modelled on Pliny and Vasari. The most interesting section, though, is the one devoted to German and Netherlandish painters. The entry on Bruegel is brisk and anecdotal. ‘He was a very quiet and thoughtful man, not fond of talking, but ready with jokes when in the company of others.’ He used to go to fairs and weddings, with a merchant friend called Hans Franckert for whom he often worked, ‘dressed in peasant’s costume, and they gave presents just like the others, pretending to be family or acquaintances of the bride or the bridegroom. Here Bruegel entertained himself observing the nature of the peasants – in eating, drinking, dancing, leaping, lovemaking and other amusements …’

What else? Not much. He liked to frighten people with ‘all kinds of spooks and uncanny noises’. When he was in Antwerp he lived with a servant girl, abandoned her because she was a terrible liar, and moved to Brussels to get away from her at his mother-in-law’s insistence when he married. He left his wife one of his pictures and ordered her to destroy others.

Van Mander’s book was published in 1604, thirty-five years after Bruegel’s death, and since he spent most of Bruegel’s working lifetime in other cities it seems unlikely that he knew him personally. So a question mark hangs over both the description and these odd few anecdotes.

Even Bruegel’s name opens up fresh mysteries. Van Mander says that he took it from the village where he was born, Brueghel, near Breda in North Brabant, which is now part of Holland. But according to Friedrich Grossmann, one of the authorities I have open on the desk in front of me, there are two villages with the name of ‘Brueghel’ or
‘Brogel’, and neither is near Breda. One is thirty-four miles to the east of it, the other forty-four miles to the south-east, near the town of Brée, which in the sixteenth century was Breede, Brida or – in Latin – Breda. But if this was Bruegel’s birthplace, then he was not proto-Dutch but proto-Belgian, and if Tony Churt’s sensitive assessment is right, his works are either chocolate or beer, or beneath notice.

But then the mere spelling of the name is a puzzle in itself. The
Massacre of the Innocents
that faces
The Hunters in
the Snow
in the Kunsthistorisches Museum is not in fact the one by Pieter Bruegel, which is at Hampton Court; it’s a copy of it by Pieter Brueghel with an ‘h’ in the middle of his surname. Pieter Brueghel with an ‘h’ is not the same painter as Pieter Bruegel without an ‘h’, nor for that matter is he someone totally unrelated who confusingly happens to have almost the same name. He is, even more confusingly, our man’s
son
, and of course is usually called Pieter Brueghel the Younger, to make the distinction from Bruegel the Elder a little clearer – though possibly not the distinction from Brueghel the Elder
with
an ‘h’, who is
Jan
Brueghel, our man’s elder son, but called the Elder to set him apart from
his
son, Jan Brueghel the Younger. Not to mention Abraham Brueghel, the son of Jan Brueghel the Younger, and Ambrosius Brueghel, another son of Jan Brueghel the Elder – making a round total of five painters called Brueghel, all with h’s, but all sprung from our man’s mysterious and potent seed.

The one certain way of distinguishing between our man and all his descendants is that his name is spelt without an ‘h’. Except that Wilhelm Glück, one of the most notable of all Bruegel scholars, I see from his great work on the table in front of me, spells him
with
an ‘h’. But then so almost always did Bruegel himself, until 1559. Then, at the age of
twenty-nine, or thirty, or thirty-four, or thirty-seven, or thirty-nine, when his reputation was already thoroughly established under the Brueghel trademark, he ceased to sign his pictures Brueghel and almost always signed them Bruegel. Why? Nobody knows.

Why not, though? It makes it easier to spell, it uses up a spot less paint. But then at once another mystery arises. If he liked the new version better, why didn’t he give it to his sons when they were born in the following decade? Why did he condemn all his descendants to the ‘h’ that he didn’t want himself?

Nobody knows.