The scene is located in a cramped, untidy office.  Bundles of documents tied up with string are piled up on every available surface, or hang in bags from hooks driven into walls and rafters.  More bundles and document bags, as well as loose papers and a quill pen, are strewn about the floor.  The village lawyer, wearing a small, black skullcap, is seated at a desk absorbed in reading a document.  Standing before him is a group of peasants.  Mute and diffident, they wait their turn, each of them clutching a sample of their produce – a bunch of grapes, a plucked fowl, a basket of eggs – intended as payment in kind for services rendered.  A scribe works at a table to one side. 

The Peasant Lawyer was one of Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s most popular compositions.  Ertz recognised twenty-five autograph versions, nineteen of which are signed and dated between 1615 and 1630[i].  The present painting is signed and dated 1616 using the spelling ‘BREUGHEL’, which is the form adopted by the artist during the course of 1616, having previously signed his name ‘BRUEGHEL’.  The composition is known in two different formats: the smaller measuring approximately 55 x 87 cm, of which this painting is an example, and the larger measuring approximately 76 x 123 cm.  Regardless of size, the paintings in the series comprise two distinct groups: the most noticeable differences between them are in the wall-covering at the back of the room and in the costume of the man standing on the far left: in the first group, to which the present painting belongs, the back wall is covered with plaited rushes and the man in question wears a jacket with grey or cream-coloured sleeves, while in the other, the wall is covered in a dark green cloth and the man wears a jacket with red sleeves.  Judging from the dated examples, the former variant occurs only from 1615-1617, while the other occurs from 1618-1626.  Thus it seems that for some unexplained reason Pieter Brueghel the Younger decided to modify some aspects of his composition around 1617-1618. 

Unusually for Pieter Brueghel the Younger, the Peasant Lawyer does not appear to be based on a work by his father Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-30-1569), nor does it resemble any of the independent compositions he developed towards the end of his career.  Despite much speculation by scholars the source of the image has not been found.  In 1993, Jacqueline Folie suggested that Brueghel may have based his work on a lost prototype of French origin, a theory predicated on the fact that the calendar hanging on the wall of the lawyer’s office is written in French and in the style of the peasants’ short beards and close-cropped hair, as well as their clothing, was not typical of the Southern Netherlands at that time[ii].  Folie, however, conceded that the presence of a calendar in French was not in itself proof, since French was the language of the legal profession in seventeenth-century Flanders.  Her hypothesis was nevertheless supported by Ingeborg Krueger[iii], whilst Klaus Ertz in his 2000 catalogue raisonné of Brueghel’s work opined that the original might be a lost painting by the French artist Nicolas Baullery (1560-1630)[iv]. 

Although this subject has been variously called The Payment of the Tithes (Le Paiement de la Dîme), or The Tax Collector’s Office, the scene actually represents the office of a country lawyer[v].  Evidence that this was the case is provided by several engravings of this image that appeared in political pamphlets of the day together with an explanatory text.  The first was published in Nuremberg in 1618, only three years after Brueghel’s earliest dated painting, with a text that explicitly lampoons the legal profession[vi]. The style of the print suggests that the engraver took as his model a painting rather than a drawing, but it is not clear whether it is based on one of Brueghel’s paintings, or another prototype.  As one would expect, it is printed in the reverse direction to the painting, but otherwise follows closely the earlier variant of Brueghel’s composition.  That this was the usual interpretation in Brueghel’s day is confirmed by the titles of pictures in certain inventories of Antwerp art collections.  For example, the 1627 inventory of Antoinette de Wiael’s collection refers to “a French lawyer [een franschen procureur], on panel by the younger Pieter Brueghel”, while that of Anna Schoot in 1663 recorded “a lawyer by the ‘Hell’ Brueghel’”[vii].

Brueghel was not, however, the only artist to exploit this satirical subject.  A number of versions were produced outside the Brueghel workshop, as well as new interpretations of the theme.  In a painting of 1628 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam[viii], the Rotterdam genre painter Pieter de Bloot (1601-1658) depicted a lawyers’ office, with a queue of people waiting patiently to seek advice.  We are left in no doubt as to the picture’s message, as it is contained in the motto on the right: “Die wil rechten om een koe die brengter noch een toe” (“If you go to a lawyer to get back your cow, you will have to bring another to pay him”), roughly the equivalent of the modern proverb, “to go to law for a sheep and lose a cow”.  Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626-1679) likewise seized the opportunity to take a swipe at the legal profession in his Monkeys playing the Peasant Lawyer of 1649[ix].  In van Kessel’s painting, all the people have been substituted for monkeys dressed in human clothing. 

BIOGRAPHY

Surprisingly few details survive regarding the life of Pieter Breughel the Younger. Even his date of birth, probably in Brussels, is not known, although two documents which state that he was thirty-six on 22 May 1601 and seventy-two on 10 October 1636 suggest he was born in 1564 or 1565.  He was the son of the celebrated peasant and landscape painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the older brother of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625).  He was therefore only about five years old when his father died prematurely in 1569 and was an adolescent when his mother, Maria Coecke, daughter of the artist and publisher Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-1550) passed away nine years later.  He may have received his first training from his maternal grandmother, Mayken Verhulst, who was a painter and had been married to Pieter Coecke van Aelst.  He lived in Brussels until 1583, when he moved to Antwerp, where he may have become an apprentice to the landscapist Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1607), as Karel van Mander claimed[x].  In 1584-85, Pieter the Younger registered as a vrymeestersson (‘free master’s son’) in the Antwerp painters’ Guild.  In 1588, he married Elizabeth Goddelet, who bore him seven children, all of whom were baptised in the Sint-Andrieskerk in Antwerp between 1589 and 1597.  Nine pupils are listed as having been trained in his workshop between 1588 and 1626, among them Frans Snyders (1579-1657) and Gonzales Coques (1614/28-1684).  His eldest son, Pieter III (1589-1639), who also became a painter, probably trained with his father before registering in the Guild of St. Luke in 1608.  Although he enjoyed a long and productive career that lasted more than half a century and exported his works widely through the firm of Forchoudt, he seems never to have owned a house and, in 1597, was behind with his rent.  He died in Antwerp in 1637 or 1638.