By way of the obsessed, British writer Toby Ferris is far from the most manic. And while his newfound interest in Pieter Bruegel the Elder – and standing before all 42 extant works attributed to him – is eccentric, it’s not outlandishly so.
After all, who doesn’t love peering at panels by this master of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance, paintings rife with stoop-shouldered peasants at their earthly labours – scything the fields, hauling water, scolding children – or enjoying simple pleasures – skating on a frozen river, dancing at a village festival or playing blind man’s bluff. Bruegel represents life in all its myriad details, even preserving for posterity a man relieving his bladder and a horseback mercenary with a lopped-off nose, a gruesome punishment of the 16th century.
Nor was the task of seeing all 42 Bruegels insurmountable. Ferris, a writer of no small skill, discovers most are housed in European museums, certainly in Belgium, but also in Austria, Germany, Britain and seven other countries, with a few hangers-on in Detroit, San Diego and New York. They are helpfully listed at the start of his book, Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels. In all, Ferris visits 22 galleries in 19 cities over five years.
Toby Ferris
The numbers must have seemed like an omen: First, 42 works. Then, Bruegel is believed to have died when he was 42, the same age as Ferris when he sets out on his unlikely pilgrimage.
Clearly, Ferris has an interest in numerical patterns – and like a schoolboy aiming for a good grade, he charts his progress in conquering what he comes to call the “Bruegel Object” by calculating what percentage of the whole is found at each site he visits. Drilled right down to three decimal points, mind you, based on the total surface area of all the works.
Ferris does a creditable job of providing insights into the artist’s life and works, although he describes himself as “a nobody in Bruegelian scholarship.” But that’s only part of the marvel of this 326-page journey. It’s also a personal memoir – Ferris delves into themes ranging from his roles as father and son, while also harking back to his youthful days of paragliding and teaching in Italy – all of it mingled with philosophical musings and the wanderings of an encyclopedic mind.
A page-spread showing "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Although it is attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Toby Ferris downgrades it to a category of "probable copies, misattributions and mislabellings."
Another strength is his bravura with language. The opening chapter, about flight, soars – the structure is an airy spiral, rising then plummeting. I felt almost airborne myself, wafting on textual turns, drafting like a peregrine. His prose is fluid, active and precise.
Above all, and so fittingly for a book about visual art, it’s also imagistic, abounding with hearty draft-horse words that effortlessly pull one forward. Inspired, I begin my own Ferris-like task, pencilling a word list on a blank page at the book’s end: wonderful, meaty words, words that might be at home in a Bruegel painting – furcula, staffage, groundling, pollarding, blunderbuss. And, if those are too common, what about ergotism, tachistoscope or barycentre?
Ferris visits Bruegel’s works mostly in whistle-stop style, although his American jaunt included a camping trip with his brother on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, an endeavour that informed his chapter on bears –imagined outside the tent and lurking both in paintings and the souls of men. Still, reading the book amidst the pandemic might spur conflicting emotions – awe that we were ever so heedless of carbon footprints and contagion, but also an intense yearning to once again spend mornings meandering through Europe's grand galleries.
A page-spread showing "Summer," 1568, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
The book also prompted me, with its seemingly effortless prose, to ponder the many challenges of arts writing – starting with the visual impressions crystallized via the non-verbal right-brain gaze that are then flung across the corpus callosum into the linear left brain, tasked to spool out a line of coherent text.
Not to mention the weaving in of sustaining supports – the historical context, the personal asides, the clever insights, even the mundane necessities like titles and dates – all without hampering the flow, and building, sentence by sentence, structures as enviable as Bruegel's Tower of Babel in chapters that eddy around particular idiosyncrasies, such as home, the gallows, the massacre, or the less evocative, but essential, technique.
And with all this, one must not forget to add some critique: I found myself wishing for full reproductions of all 42 works, along with more details, to illustrate the points Ferris makes, all in some orderly, easy-to-access way.
Nor must one overlook a pertinent quotation: “Just as the social defines the individual, the impressions and words of others will inevitably colour your response to a painting. For all that, you never really stand in front of a painting with anyone else. Looking at a painting is a solitary experience. What is there to say, standing in front of a painting, that isn’t banal, pointless, performative, above all distracting?”
Indeed. What more can be said? Still, after standing with Ferris in front of 42 Bruegels in this whirlwind of a book, I’m quite certain I’ll never look at a Bruegel in quite the same way. ■
Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels by Toby Ferris. Harper, 2020.
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