Parable of the Sower (Bruegel)
Parable of the Sower | |
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Artist | Pieter Bruegel the Elder |
Year | 1557 |
Medium | oil on wood panel |
Dimensions | 73.7 cm × 102.9 cm (29.0 in × 40.5 in) |
Location | Timken Museum of Art, San Diego |
Parable of the Sower is a 1557 landscape painting by Dutch and Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is now in the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego.[1]
Background
In 1553, Bruegel left Antwerp to study in Italy. He passed through and made sketches of the Alps on his return trip. These drawings influenced the mountains seen in the upper right background.[1]
Analysis
The painting depicts the Parable of the Sower found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and is among the earliest signed paintings and large-scale landscapes by Bruegel. The sower himself is seen spreading seeds in the lower left foreground. A church and a Flemish village line the river that runs from the lower right to the upper left of the painting. On the right bank of the river, near a small group of boats, Jesus is seen preaching the titular parable to a crowd.[1]
John Wilson, executive director of the Timken Museum, finds that the painting exhibits the detail, religiosity, and human element found in Bruegel's later paintings. He explains, "Bruegel totally humanizes the spiritual nature of this religious subject matter...Little things catch your eye, like the tower of a church, the thatched hut, birds and horses."[2]
Larry Silver of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a parallel between the significance of the painting and the meaning of the parable. He writes that the painting "uses the image of a sower, whose seeds were partly devoured by birds, partly fruitless when they fell upon stony soil or were choked by thorns, and partly successful when they found fertile soil. Brilliantly, therefore, Bruegel selected Jesus’s first parable as the subject for his own inaugural landscape painting, a work that planted the seed for his own affinity with landscape."[3]
See also
References
- ^ a b c "Parable of the Sower". Timken Museum. Retrieved October 30, 2019.
- ^ Jarmusch, Ann (September 9, 2011). "Masterpiece: 'Parable of the Sower'". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved October 30, 2019.
- ^ Silver, Larry. "Pieter Bruegel's Symbolic Highlands in the Lowlands". Carleton College. Retrieved October 30, 2019.
- v
- t
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- List of paintings
- Parable of the Sower (1557)
- Naval Battle in the Gulf of Naples (1558–1562)
- The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559)
- Netherlandish Proverbs (1559)
- Children's Games (1560)
- Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
- The Triumph of Death (c. 1562)
- The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562)
- The Suicide of Saul (1562)
- Two Monkeys (1562)
- Dull Gret (1563)
- Adoration of the Magi in a Winter Landscape (1563)
- The Tower of Babel (1563)
- Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (1563)
- Adoration of the Magi in a Winter Landscape (1563 or 1567)
- Adoration of the Kings (1564)
- The Procession to Calvary (1564)
- Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1565)
- The Gloomy Day (1565)
- The Harvesters (1565)
- The Hay Harvest (1565)
- The Return of the Herd (1565)
- The Wine of Saint Martin's Day (c. 1565–1568)
- The Hunters in the Snow (1565)
- Winter Landscape with Ice skaters and Bird trap (1565)
- Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1565–1567)
- The Census at Bethlehem (1566)
- The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist (1566)
- The Wedding Dance (1566)
- Conversion of Paul (1567)
- The Land of Cockaigne (1567)
- The Peasant Wedding (1567)
- The Peasant Dance (c. 1567)
- The Beggars (1568)
- The Peasant and the Nest Robber (1568)
- The Blind Leading the Blind (1568)
- The Magpie on the Gallows (1568)
- The Misanthrope (1568)
- The Storm at Sea (c. 1569)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Wierix%2C_Johannes_%28attributed_to%29_-_Portrait_of_Pieter_Brueghel_%28I%29_-_1572_-_RP-P-1907-593_cropped.jpg/75px-Wierix%2C_Johannes_%28attributed_to%29_-_Portrait_of_Pieter_Brueghel_%28I%29_-_1572_-_RP-P-1907-593_cropped.jpg)
- The Painter and The Buyer (1565)
- Pieter Brueghel the Younger (son)
- Jan Brueghel the Elder (son)
- Jan Brueghel the Younger (grandson)
- Breugel, Netherlands
- Son en Breugel
- The Mill and the Cross (2011 film)
- Bruegel (crater)
- 9664 Brueghel
- Bruegel (institution)