Autumn (Slaughter and Pressing the Grapes)

Pieter Brueghel the Younger built much of his living out of his dead father's inventions. Pieter Bruegel the Elder died in 1569, when this son was about five, so the younger man never really learned at his father's side. What he had instead were the compositions, and he copied and sold them for decades from his Antwerp workshop. This panel is the autumn of a set of four seasons. It gathers the work of the season into one view: men pressing grapes for wine and butchering a pig for the winter store, the ordinary calendar of a Flemish year. The design goes back to prints published in the 1560s, where autumn and winter were credited to the painter Hans Bol rather than to the Bruegels at all. Two full painted sets of the series are known to survive, and the workshop turned out partial runs beside them, small differences from one version to the next. The pig and the wine-press fix the month without a word of writing. This is November, the point in the year when a household killed and salted what it could not feed through the cold.