Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jan Brueghel the Elder
Flemish; 16th-century, 17th-century
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
73%
Travelers at a Busy Ford before a Panoramic Landscape. c1605. Oil on oak panel
The paint in Brueghel's landscapes seems always to be in some sort of a state of flux, to have only ever coalesced for a moment as the image fixed before you on the panel and to be about to lapse back into disorder and constant random churning. It's in the way he paints his grounds as so many thin, dappled, shifting layers of pigment, and in how he's made this painting's water limpid by simply speckling the riverbed with dots of white. The beauty of Brueghel's technique, however, detracts from the quality of this painting in toto: the painterliness subordinates composition, making things all seem a little diffuse and equivocal, unstructured. For better and for worse, this piece has on display all the facility of Brueghel's flower paintings, but much less of their restraint. (TFS, 2025)
Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art
63%
Holy Family with a Garland of Flowers. c1620. Oil on panel (with Peter Paul Rubens and Workshop)
The collaborative element (this is one of many JB/PPR dual canvases) makes this, ultimately, a metapainting — it's a trompe l'oeil painting of a framed and garlanded painting. This means that the reasons we typically appreciate Rubens (the freeness of his hand, his roving color, the buxom nature of his compositions) are all attenuated, and subordinated to the piece's conceptual aims. This isn't the worst thing, as the sort of one-note reflections on the fiction of painting that trompe-l'oeil stimulates serves, here and there, to make us better notice this painting as a painting. The conceit that the flowers are "real" but the family scene an "illusion" tinges the way we notice chromatic affinities between these two components of the total painting; the octagonal shape of the painted internal frame around Rubens's contribution enhances the energy produced by the network of cast glances. But these are small painterly potatoes when it comes to an artist of Rubens's caliber. (Brueghel's a minor painter and can't be blamed for what are ultimately trifles, if interesting ones.) (TFS, 2025)