There are fifty shades of gray, and most of them can be seen at Somerset House in London, where the Courtauld Gallery has reunited all three surviving grisailles by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (ca. 1525–69). The Courtauld owns one of the trio; the Frick Collection in New York another; and Upton House, a National Trust property in Banbury, Oxfordshire, the third. The last time these three oils were in the same place, Philip II was the King of Spain, and William Shakespeare was a small child.
The grisaille’s appeal lies in its challenge to artist and viewer. Like the etcher and engraver, the grisaille artist must evoke color by tonalities between black and white. Further, as a grisaille can emulate a sculptural relief, it can demonstrate the primacy of painting over sculpture. In The Death of the Virgin (ca.1564), on loan from Upton House, mourners witness the Virgin Mary’s last moments. She sits in bed, bathed in the divine glow from the candlestick she holds. The imminent miracle of her Assumption contrasts with the homeliness of the other, lesser light sources: a pair of candles on a high ledge, a hearth fire, and a single candle, which reflects the palest of pinks on the pewter ewers that have been left on the table by the hearth.
The subtlety of Brueghel’s technique, and the compatibility of grisaille with nocturnal religious scenes, is shown by contrast with the adjoining engraved copy by Philips Galle (1537–1612). Galle’s transcription is faithful and considered—he even moves a chair to correct Brueghel’s perspective—but his cross-hatching cannot match the glowing tonal shading of Brueghel’s oils. Galle tells the story—a note under his engraving informs us in black and white that the geographer Abraham Ortelius, a close friend of Pieter the Elder and the grisaille’s first owner, commissioned the engraving so he could give copies to his friends—but the engraving loses the intimate, lambent feel of the oil.
The decay of the second Brueghel grisaille, the Frick Collection’s Three Soldiers (1568), instructively exaggerates Brueghel’s method. The figures, a drummer, fife player, and standard bearer, are Landknecht, mercenaries in Philip II’s savage war of peace, his repression of the rebels of the Low Countries in the name of the Habsburg empire and the Papacy. The discoloring of Brueghel’s white preparatory layer and final clear varnish has given the cool tonalities of the original an oddly pacific bloom of pinkish beige.
The third grisaille, the Courtauld’s own Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1565) has been interpreted as a plea for religious tolerance. Here, light emerges from darkness. Jesus writes, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” in dust before the judges and the accused—in vernacular Flemish. The light proceeds from the shadowed rear to the foreground, and, like the writing in the dust, from left to right, a visual corollary of Jesus’s injunction. The force of the words splits the crowd, turning half of them back into the darkness, and the prosecutor’s jaw drops. Again, discoloration, this time to a pale tangerine, amplifies the unworldly intensity of the image, giving a marmoreal solidity to the figures.
The grisaille originated in the fourteenth century in the Netherlands, a terrain of long winters and luminous gray skies. Before Pieter Brueghel the Elder, grisaille was used in minor sections of larger structures, such as the outer wings of an altarpiece, or in manuscript illustration. Brueghel, one of the first to make independent cabinet pictures in grisaille, expanded the form—Rubens and Jasper Johns experimented with it—and the market too. Demand was so high that Pieter the Elder’s sons, Pieter the Younger (1564–1638) and Jan the Elder (1568–1625), made a family business out of copying their father’s originals. But they were unable to keep the grisailles in the family.
Jan the Elder’s copy of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (ca. 1597–98) was preceded by another Courtauld holding, a 1579 oil by the Antwerp-born engraver Pieter Perret (1555–1634), who is believed to have painted it at the request of Cardinal Federico Borromeo of Milan. Pieter the Elder willed his original Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery to Jan the Elder, but by 1628, when Pieter the Younger made a copy of Christ and the Woman, Jan had been dead for three years, from cholera. The original must have been sold off: Pieter the Younger worked not from his father’s original, but from Perret’s copy.
This is a small gem of an exhibition: ten works from nine collections in one room, and each exhibit refracting upon the others. The complex comparisons that these selections create are especially useful in judging a fourth grisaille, The Visit to the Peasants (ca. 1600). The attribution of this oil has long been a gray area, oscillating between Pieter the Elder and Jan the Elder. This exhibition demonstrates its case for Jan the Elder, by allowing the visitor to compare the black outlines and white highlights in The Visit to the Peasants, on loan from the Lugt Collection in Paris, to Jan the Elder’s of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, on loan from the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung in Munich. And the latter is in turn complemented by an anonymous Lombard copy from around 1625, loaned by the Museo dell’Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.
It would not be possible to appreciate this resemblance, or to trace the proliferation of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, were it not for the care with which the Courtauld’s curator, Dr. Karen Serres, has organized this family reunion. To put it in black and white, see the grisailles while you can.
“Brueghel in Black & White: Three Grisailles Reunited,” opened at the Courtauld Gallery, The Strand, London W1 on February 4, and remains on view through May 8, 2016.