Studies of Animals (Donkeys, Cats, Monkeys)

These are working studies. On two oak panels, around 1616, Jan Brueghel painted donkeys, cats and monkeys from life, quickly and loosely, the way another artist might fill a sketchbook. Studies like these stayed in the workshop and were used again and again. The museum links them to pictures of about 1617 in the Prado and the Mauritshuis that have similar monkeys, and a crouching cat from these panels turns up in his Allegory of Hearing in Madrid. Studies of dogs served the same purpose for his paintings of Diana, the huntress goddess, in the early 1620s. Vienna acquired the panels only in 1932, as a bequest from the collector Gustav von Benda.