Fischmarkt (Die Berufung der Apostel Petrus und Andreas)

Antwerp around 1608 was a great port with its river shut. The Dutch had controlled the mouth of the Scheldt since 1585 and let almost nothing through, and while Brueghel was at work on this, envoys were negotiating the truce signed in 1609, which left the blockade in place. He had been court painter since 1606 to Albert and Isabella, the Habsburg rulers who governed the Southern Netherlands from Brussels, and what he painted was a quayside heaped with fish.

He set the catch out species by species, with the same cataloguing eye he turned on flowers. The gospel scene that gives the panel its second title sits well back inside the crowd, Christ calling two fishermen, Peter and Andrew, away from this exact trade, and you have to look for them on an oak panel only 49 centimetres high.