The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist

Bruegel painted this sermon of John the Baptist in 1566, in Antwerp. He was 41, the leading landscape and genre painter in the Netherlands, and he had been painting crowd scenes for a decade. This is one of his largest and most complex compositions. A crowd has gathered in a forest clearing to hear John the Baptist preach. John stands at the left, a small figure in a green robe, gesturing toward the crowd. The crowd fills the rest of the painting: dozens of figures, some standing, some seated, some leaning against trees, some arriving from the right. They are drawn from every level of society: peasants, soldiers, merchants, nobles, monks. In the background, a river winds through a wide landscape with a city on the horizon. The painting was made at a moment of religious crisis in the Netherlands. In 1566, the Protestant Reformation was sweeping through the Low Countries, and the Beeldenstorm, the iconoclastic fury, was about to break out. Bruegel painted a crowd listening to a preacher in the wilderness, which was how Protestant meetings were held in the Netherlands at the time, in secret gatherings outside the city walls. The painting may be a quiet record of an illegal Protestant meeting, or it may be a biblical scene with contemporary costumes and faces. Bruegel left the meaning open. Bruegel was born near Breda around 1525. He traveled to Italy in the 1550s, then settled in Antwerp and later Brussels. He painted landscapes, peasant scenes, and biblical narratives, always setting them in the contemporary Netherlands. His crowd scenes are his most distinctive works: he could paint a hundred figures in a single composition, each one individually characterized, each one doing something specific. No other painter in Europe could do this. Oil on panel, 95 by 160 centimeters, roughly 37 by 63 inches. Bruegel painted on a smooth wood panel, building the figures in thin layers of color over a light ground. The faces are tiny, some no more than a centimeter tall, but each one has a specific expression. The landscape in the background is painted with the same care as the foreground figures, with the river, the city, and the distant mountains all clearly rendered. The wide horizontal format and crowd subject make this print work well in a living room or dining room with traditional furniture. The landscape detail rewards close viewing. A dark wood frame suits the painting's earthy palette. The 18x24 size gives the figures and the landscape enough room to read. The painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, where it has been since 1906. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.