LG&M index richard grayson. linda marie walker. angus trumble sarah thomas Introductory essays from the publication "LAWYERS GUNS & MONEY"
The tax-collector's office
ANGUS TRUMBLE
Associate Curator of European Art, Art Gallery of South Australia
Old Master paintings offer abundant possibilities for examining the subject of systems of power, legislation, economy and the artist. The most obvious reason for this is that the international traffic in pre-nineteenth-century European art is among the oldest and most carefully scrutinised sectors of the art market. Recent and distinguished scholarship has given us the impression that we may know the market for Dutch pictures in the seventeenth century almost as well as we know our own. Extraordinary, collaborative research efforts like the Netherlands-based Rembrandt Project have succeeded in gathering a wealth of new information about artists' workshop practice, patronage, materials and techniques. Dozens of previously anonymous artists working in Rembrandt's studio have now been identified, their works made known and assembled in chronological order of execution. The Rembrandt whose paintings will be seen in Australia later this year is a very different artist from the shadowy Rembrandt of early nineteenth-century scholarship and still more distant from the mighty Olympian who had emerged by 1900. The political, social and economic dynamics of the society in which Rembrandt, his friends and colleagues dwelt in the seventeenth century becomes more and more familiar to us as we approach the twenty-first. A small panel painting by Pieter Brueghel the younger in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia will here serve to illustrate what I mean, but almost any other seventeenth-century Dutch, French or Italian painting would do equally well.
At the end of the sixteenth century, a costly war of independence was fought in the Netherlands between the Protestant Dutch in the north and Spanish armies occupying Flanders (modern Belgium, sometimes referred to as the Spanish Netherlands) in the south. Netherlandish towns were long accustomed to paying heavy local taxes for the purpose of building channels and dykes to drain the land and keep out the sea. However, the crippling burden of additional war taxes, and levies raised to pay for the repair of sea walls and other public works destroyed in battles and skirmishes, made the tax-collector the most hated of petty officials on both sides of the conflict. Although there were sacred precedents for this kind of opprobrium contained in the Acts of the Apostles and elsewhere in the New Testament, it did not suit governments then any more than it does now to allow taxation to be seen as an unjust imposition.
The tax-collector's office is one of approximately forty copies by the artist of a lost painting by his much more famous father, Pieter Brueghel the elder. It shows a group of poor Flemish villagers waiting patiently to submit their taxes not in cash but in baskets of eggs, poultry, game and other produce. A prosperously-dressed tax-collector, assisted by a staff of half-witted clerks, is shown peering at a parchment behind a counter laden with piles of documents and money-bags. The artist mocks the wastefulness of this hive of bumbling officials by showing mountainous bundles of cancelled bills and receipts spilling carelessly across the office floor.
The younger Brueghel would almost certainly not have described the picture as a copy. The "original" painting may itself have existed in numerous versions, produced to satisfy a strong demand for it among art-collecting burghers. It is true that the price for such a picture would have been lower than if it had been unique, but the purchaser or successful bidder at auction would not have been put off by the existence of other versions. Dutch and Flemish paintings were in fact made famous and therefore desirable by the production and dissemination of copies. Nor, in all probability, would the artist have painted the picture entirely by himself. A busy and efficient workshop would naturally assign to this painting a pupil who, in this phase of his education, was permitted to graduate from game to figures, books and documents to game, wooden furniture to books and documents, and so on down the line to the cutting of pieces of wood from which to build the panel.
Just as the scene seems weird from the vantage-point of the late twentieth century, so too the central group of stoic peasant tax-payers must have seemed remote from the merchant class to whom the painting was made available in Antwerp in about 1615. They are a nostalgic memory of a peaceful estuarine farm landscape long since threatened by rampaging cavalry and foot soldiers who, as a matter of routine, smashed the eggs, ate the poultry and brutalised the neighbourhood. They also represent an economy which the remarkable explosion of late-sixteenth-century Netherlandish trade, banking and international shipping and commerce was rapidly leaving behind. The early owners of this painting would probably have known more about the indemnification of teak shipments or the demand for fine lace in England than they knew about breeding fowl or cattle. They were almost certainly Catholic, and therefore taxed not only by the government of Antwerp, but also by a Spanish viceroy and, at a different time of year, by the Pope. To that extent the satirical mode of the picture made it subversive.
The painting hangs in the Art Gallery of South Australia near a group of much larger Dutch landscape pictures painted later in the seventeenth century in the other, ultimately victorious jurisdiction to the north. The boxy space and cloddish figures suffer by comparison, and make the subject seem the more bucolic and backward-looking. In some respects this impression is quite reasonable. It might even be described as a sixteenth-century picture masquerading as a seventeenth. Nevertheless, coercion, financial dependence, subjugation and latent violence converge at the edges of this unpretentious domestic picture, even though the frame is not original.
June 1997