Spring

Of all the images this workshop repeated, Spring was the one it made most often. At least eleven painted versions are recorded, differing in small ways, one brighter, one cut into a circle, one in plain brown ink, as buyers asked for their own. The design shows the labors that open the farming year: gardeners laying out and planting formal beds, others pruning and shearing sheep, the ground being readied for everything that comes after. It was Pieter Brueghel the Younger who turned these prints into paintings, working from designs that trace back to his father Pieter Bruegel the Elder and to engravings published in Antwerp in the 1560s. The son ran the family studio as a business, meeting steady demand for scenes people already knew and wanted on their own walls. This panel is one season of a set of four, and it marks the calendar as plainly as a farmer would. The work here is the work of early spring, before there is anything yet to harvest.