|
Late in his career Pieter Brueghel the Younger seems to have turned to painting small and unpretentious scenes of peasant villages of an unusually humble and direct nature. This late creative phase of his career represents a distinct change from the highly successful repetitions of his father's famous designs that had secured the fame and fortune of his prolific studio in Antwerp. In them we find an engagingly sympathetic approach to life in the countryside, with the figures, both young and old, reduced to a smaller scale, but still engaged in everyday scenes. These late landscapes seem to have been quite personal in character, for each scene is known in only a few versions, and all are free of the prolific repetition that characterised much of his studio's output
|
