The Sermon of St. John the Baptist

This Sermon of Saint John the Baptist is one of the finest treatments of what was Pieter Brueghel the Younger's most successful and popular large-scale religious composition. Yet, until now, it has remained largely known only through its first and last appearance at auction in 1855, when it was acquired by ancestors of the present owners (see Provenance). It would first be published in 1969 in Georges Marlier’s catalogue raisonné on the artist under Brueghel’s unsigned autograph versions (op. cit.). Decades later, Klaus Ertz would include it in his own catalogue, this time under the artist’s questionable works, having never seen it in the flesh or seemingly from an image, referencing only Marlier’s description of the work in his entry. Its reappearance and constitutes a major addition to our appreciation of Brueghel the Younger's oeuvre, remarkable both in terms of the skilfully detailed characterisation of the figures and its wonderful state of preservation.

The inspiration for the subject, as with so many of the younger Brueghel's paintings, was provided by a work of his father Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), widely acknowledged as the picture dated 1566 in the Széptmûvészeti Museum, Budapest (fig. 1). The quality and number of extant versions by the younger Brueghel suggest that he knew his father's original in spite of the thirty years or more that elapsed between his own production and his father's death. Klaus Ertz recorded thirteen autograph versions, including dated examples from 1601 (Bonn, Rheinisches Landesmuseum), 1604 (St. Petersburg, Hermitage), 1620 (Bern, Ludwig Collection) and 1624 (Lier, Stedelijk Museum Wuyts-Van Campen en Baron Caroly), as well as significant undated examples, such as that formerly in the collection of Baron Evence III Coppée (1882-1945), sold in these Rooms, 7 July 2009, lot 8 (£1,497,250). Like the present picture, many works would also remain on the walls of private collections and unknown to Ertz, like the remarkable example also sold in these Rooms on 8 December 2009 (lot 16, £1,553,250).

Painted in the year of the iconoclastic outbreaks in the Low Countries, scholars have long held the view that Bruegel the Elder's picture offered a coded comment on the religious debates that raged in the region during the 1560s, interpreted as an allusion to the clandestine sermons that Protestant reformers held in the countryside in response to anti-Protestant Habsburg policies. Yet Bruegel’s Sermon was significant not for its presumed political associations but the ‘transformation of the theme from an earlier landscape tradition into a rationale for portraying the great variety of humanity' (A. Woollett and A. van Suchtelen, eds., Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 2006 p. 188).

In the central foreground, as here, the artist (a devout Catholic) depicts a man in black who faces the viewer and reads the palm of his neighbour, which can be seen as thinly veiled defiance against Calvin's prohibition of the reading of palms. The distinctive face of the perpetrator suggests that it may be a portrait, and several candidates have been proposed, including the artist himself, the commissioner of the painting or Thomas Armenteros, the adviser to Margaret of Parma, though all remain supposition. The figure of Christ has often been identified either as the man in grey behind the left arm of the Baptist or the bearded man further to the left with his arms crossed. Inverting the relationship between the religious subject and its setting, the scene is filled with an astonishing assortment of figures and delightful vignettes that emphasise the disassociation from the message of God, with the viewer also placed in the role of a spectator, observing the scattering of diverse figures from behind.

The popularity of the picture a generation later, in the time of Brueghel the Younger, attests to a more general, aesthetic appreciation of the theme, when the subject had not only lost its political implications but ran contrary to the religious current of the time. Jacqueline Folie observed that the composition was enjoyed more for its representation of humanity, with the motley crowd gathered around John the Baptist embodying 'the whole human race in all its diversity of races, social conditions, temperaments and inner dispositions – eager, attentive, curious, sceptical or indifferent listeners’ (translated from the French, in Bruegel: Une dynastie de peintres, exhibition catalogue, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1980, p. 143).