…; art market, London, 1968, as Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, R.A. (1802-73);…; the dealer Malcolm R. Waddingham (1927-2014), London;…; anonymous sale, London (Sotheby’s), 21 March 2005, no. 12; anonymous sale, Amsterdam (Sotheby’s), Amsterdam, 15 November 2005, no. 4; sale [section ‘The Property of a Family’], London (Sotheby’s), 10 July 2014, no. 140; anonymous sale, New York (Christie’s), 20 October 2020, no. 50

K. Ertz, Jan Breughel der Jüngere (1601-1678): die Gemälde, mit kritischem OEuvrekatalog, Freren 1984, p. 501, no. 331; K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625): kritischer Katalog der Gemälde, Lingen 2008, p. 1260

 Jan Brueghel the Younger was the eldest son of his famous namesake artist Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568-1625), who no doubt was his first and, in any event, most important tutor, and Isabella de Jode. Jan the Younger’s oeuvre chiefly consists of landscape, often enlivened with mythological or Biblical scenes, and still lifes. They are strongly indebted to his father’s. As a consequence, their work is often difficult to tell apart.

The present charming panel, showing the head of a roebuck seen from three different angels as separative motifs floating as it were against an undefined background, is a study that would have been used by the artist as a model for finished paintings. Deer feature in numerous landscape scenes by Brueghel the Younger, from Paradise scenes to hunting parties, but none of the heads are to be found literally in any of them. Possibly, Brueghel copied them from the sketch in a free manner or there are works for which they were used are lost or not yet catalogued.[1]

A highly similar study, previously also attributed to Jan the Younger by Klaus Ertz but later on restored to Jan the Elder is in Narbonne (fig. 1). Ertz dated the latter picture around 1615 on the basis of two paintings which feature the animals. Our study is somehow related to Brueghel the Elder’s and was dated by Ertz slightly later, at any rate before Jan the Younger’s journey to Italy in the spring of 1622. Many more such studies will have existed by both Jan the Elder and his son, but hardly any survive today. They are mentioned in Jan the Younger’s modest estate drawn up after his death.[2] Together with drawn studies they bear witness to Brueghel’s fastidious methods of preparing his often rich and dense compositions.

Brueghel the Younger returned to Antwerp on learning of his father’s death in early 1625. The year thereafter, he married the daughter of Abraham Janssens (1567-1632), who bore him eleven children. Brueghel may have been active in Paris in the early 1650s, but thereafter probably remained in his native Antwerp. He often collaborated with figure painters, among them Hendrik van Balen, Frans Francken II, Jacob Jordaens, Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger, who had married his half-sister.

Fig. 1, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Three Studies of

a Roebuck’s Head, panel, 20 x 23 cm,

Narbonne, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire

Notes