?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
PIETER BRUEGEL (AFTER) The Battle about Money.
Engraving, after 1570. 240x310 mm; 9 1/2x12 1/4 inches, narrow to thread margins. Third state (of 3), with the address of Galle. Engraved by Pieter van der Heyden. A very good, dark, well-inked impression of this scarce engraving with strong contrasts.
According to Bassens and Van Grieken, this engraving, "Is often given titles that suggest its theme is a battle between money bags or piggy banks on the one hand and strong boxes on the other, with the former alluding to people of modest means and the latter to the rich and powerful. Yet this is actually a free-for-all, piggy banks (or rather spaarpotjes--literally savings pots), strong boxes, money bags, purses and barrels of cash against each other. Some of these combatants have heads, while others do not; but they are all heavily armed and have limbs with which they lay about one another fiercely . . . A theme such as greed--and above all the contrast between personal enrichment on the one hand and pursuit of common good on the other--was particularly relevant in the metropolis of Antwerp, with its rapidly emerging merchantile elite." Hollstein 146; Bastelaer 146; Lebeer 54; Bassens and Van Grieken 35.
