Catalogue entry no. 81 by William W. Robinson:
In his biography of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Het Schilderboeck (The Painter’s Book) of 1604, Karel van Mander formulated an earthy, and later frequently quoted, image to underscore the verisimilitude of the artist’s paintings of mountains. “On his travels he drew many views from life, so that it is said that when he was in the Alps he swallowed all those mountains and rocks which, upon returning home, he spat out again onto canvases and panels, so faithfully was he able, in this respect and others, to follow Nature.”
The Harvard Alpine Landscape belongs to a group of some twenty drawings, nearly all of mountainous scenery, which scholars long believed to be the type of study from nature that Van Mander had in mind. However, as Hans Mielke demonstrated in two articles published in 1991 and reiterated in his 1996 catalogue raisonné of Bruegel’s drawings, the attribution of these alpine scenes cannot be sustained—a conclusion he initially reached after learning that the watermarks in two of the sheets date from at least fifteen years after the artist’s death. The mountain landscapes constitute a coherent group, but none are signed, and differences in technique and spatial composition distinguish them from incontrovertibly autograph works by the artist (e.g., 1999.132) . Details in several of the drawings correspond to passages in four of the etchings after Bruegel’s designs known as the Large Landscapes, which were published in Antwerp about 1555. Earlier scholars supposed that Bruegel consulted the drawings when composing the prints, but Mielke showed that, on the contrary, the draftsman of the mountain views copied those details from the Large Landscapes. Additionally, the outline of a massif in one of the mountain landscapes was traced from an etching published nearly three decades after Bruegel died. Bruegel’s autograph models for two of the Large Landscapes have survived, and their pen work and representation of space differ from those of the Harvard work and others in the group.
The draftsman of the Alpine Landscape completed the drawing in two campaigns. For the mountains and sky that occupy most of the sheet he drew minute, closely spaced, delicate lines in a reddish-brown ink, while he executed the figures, trees, and church in the foreground with fewer and more forceful strokes in a darker, grayish-brown ink. The handling of the foreground is closely comparable to the technique of a village scene in Berlin, the only landscape in the group that does not represent an alpine panorama (Fig. 1). The additive compositional process—development of the design in stages distinguishable by their different inks—was followed in other works in the group of mountain landscapes. In several of them, including the Harvard example, the draftsman left the immediate foreground incomplete. The pen work in the Harvard sheet, in both foreground and distance, is over an incomplete preliminary sketch in black chalk that outlines prominent features of the landscape. Traces of the sketch remain visible beneath the contours of some of the distant mountain ridges and the steeple of the chapel at lower left.
Mielke dated the mountain landscapes to the end of the sixteenth century and tentatively ascribed them to Roelant Savery. In the 1590s, Roelant’s brother Jacob produced an extensive group of drawings of alpine and village views, most of which he “signed” with Bruegel’s name and supplied with dates from 1559 to 1562. These passed as Bruegel originals until 1986, when Mielke exposed them, on the basis of their technique and style, as forgeries by Jacob. That one of the Savery brothers was also responsible for the mountain landscapes seems plausible. Not only did Jacob produce a group of brilliant Bruegel imitations, but Roelant proved to be the author of an extensive group of figure studies—the so-called naer het leven (“from life”) drawings—that were ascribed to Bruegel until 1970. Additionally, the pen work in original drawings by both of these versatile masters purposefully emulates Bruegel’s technique and closely resembles the handling of the mountain landscapes. In any event, no consensus has developed regarding the attribution of these impressive drawings. When a selection of them was shown in the 2001 exhibition Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, they were given to an unidentified Master of the Mountain Landscapes.
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