Pieter Brueghel the Younger review – weighty works from son of revolutionary artist

Barber Institute, Birmingham
Snogging, dancing and streams of excrement abound in a show that proves Brueghel’s boy was equally keen to depict the joys and squalor of peasant life

A man releases a stream of brown excrement as he sits on a window ledge with his naked apple-like buttocks bulging out. Welcome to the world of the common people as painted by the great artistic revolutionary Pieter Bruegel the Elder – but with a twist. The window-shitter, like the man who sticks out his fat belly and bulging codpiece as he dances at a wedding, or the young woman who throws a contemptuous look at a lusty youth, was painted by his son.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the creator of such masterpieces of European art as The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, the Tower of Babel and The Hunters in the Snow, died in 1569 at the height of his powers, leaving two young sons, Pieter and Jan. The Barber Institute’s tiny and yet epic journey into the Bruegelian cosmos explores how Pieter Bruegel the Younger carried on his dad’s art trade, almost as if he’d inherited the family shop.

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