Short Life in a Strange World

 
 
Short Life in a Strange World

Birth to Death in 42 Panels

by Toby Ferris

Fourth Estate

2020

 

 

Usually I finish my first book of the year a bit faster than this, but 2025 has been off to a rough start. Car trouble, a broken dishwasher that replaces my leisure time with housework, extra tasks at work, recovering from being sick myself, worrying over a sick relative. And, I don't know if you've noticed, but the rest of the world outside my house isn't doing so well either.
 

Short Life in a Strange World is an account of author Toby Ferris's personal quest to see all the remaining paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that exist in the world. There are 42 such paintings, and all but one are in public museums. Ferris started this project the year he turned 42, the same age that Bruegel died.
 

Short Life is a mix of things. It's structured by Ferris's trips. The prologue tells us how he got started, the epilogue takes place after he finished, and each of the dozen chapters covers one trip, where he usually visited several museums, often in more than one country. Ferris talks about the logistics of the trips, about the specific paintings he saw on each one. He talks about Bruegel's life and painting techniques; he talks about specific details and recurring themes in Bruegel's art. Ferris tells us about his own life, his brother, who is also an author, his dead father, who left behind a few sparsely completed diaries when he died. This is all blended and interwoven, and though at times the mix contains (to my mind) too much Ferris and not enough Bruegel, I generally liked the way he integrated all this material, the way a single detail in a painting would require a bit of history about the 16th century Netherlands, and relate to an incident in Bruegel's life, and remind Ferris of something his father did when he was younger.
 

 

Dulle Griet via Wikimedia

 

The Triumph of Death via Wikimedia

 

The Fall of the Rebel Angels via Wikimedia

  

 
Before reading Short Life, my most vivid images of Bruegel were probably his apocalyptic paintings, scenes where early modern warfare mingled with scenes of Christian eschatology, like Dulle Griet, The Triumph of Death, or The Fall of the Rebel Angels. These images are sometimes falsely attributed to fellow Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But many more of Bruegel's paintings are scenes of peasant life, like Children's Games or The Wedding Dance, and they often depict winter, like The Census at Bethlehem.
 

 

Children's Games via Wikimedia

 

The Wedding Dance via Wikimedia

 

The Census at Bethlehem via Wikimedia

  

 
This is what Bruegel is best known for - his dense, detailed paintings of the communal aspects of village life, often blending realism with allegorical meaning, often including those at the margins of peasant life, the poor, beggars, people with injuries or disabilities, children.
 
Bruegel lived during a time of dramatic change, as Europe was convulsed by the effects of the Gutenberg printing press and the arrival of new goods from the Americas, as leaders sent soldiers and mercenaries to slaughter and burn in the name of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Reformation. Bruegel's legacy was also spread by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who used sketches inherited from his father to paint copies that now far outnumber the originals.
 
Ferris is a person who likes numbers, and seemingly doesn't really like other people. He hates crowds, and on most of his trips, the route from the airport to the museum was all the sightseeing he did. He made a spreadsheet to track his project, and he talks about it far, FAR too much. He calculated the total square footage of Bruegel paintings, and each chapter lists the percentage of that total he saw on that trip.
 
In the shortest chapters, Ferris visits a single museum to see only one painting, and whatever thoughts he shares sound trite. The longer chapters are better; my favorite was probably the chapter about his trip to America, where he talks about the risk of encountering bears while camping, getting angry at his brother while camping, a bear that appears in a Bruegel painting, a violent 'game' similar to bear-baiting that appears in a different painting, bears as a symbol of anger, and Bruegel's depiction of allegorical figures like the embodiment of anger. It's a chapter where Ferris's interlacing really works.

 

It wasn't particularly deliberate on my part, but I'm glad I read this in the winter, during my own Bruegel year.