Nigel Clarke’s ‘Brueg[h]el’s Brush’ – a personal view
Peter Sheppard Skaerved
Towards the end of 2023, Nigel Clarke and I started talking about Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.?1525-1530 – 1569). Over the past thirty years, our collaboration has been led by our areas of shared interest and travel together. This has resulted in concertante, ensemble and solo works inspired by Milton, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Balkan folk tales, the Gobi Desert, the town of Dover, Edit Cavell … for the first time we were going to work on art.
Brueg[h]el’s Brush consists of two books of miniatures for solo violin and viola. These respond to 25 works by the Bruegel family in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium, in Brussels. The 11 movements comprising ‘Book One’ replicate the sequence of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638) hanging in the most celebrated room in the museum. Indeed, this is the order in which I performed them in situ for three concerts in spring 2026. The 14 movements making up book two, reflect the constellation of works scattered across the whole site, also including works by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678), and collaborations with Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Hendrick van Balen the Elder (1573-1632).
It was our great honour, that Brueg[h]el’s Brush was embraced by the community, the family of the Royal Museums of Fine Art. They encouraged us to weave the project into the fabric of ideas, inspiration and activities within the museum. Nigel and I are profoundly grateful to all our friends and collaborators there. They are an inspiration at every step of the way, and the music would not have happened without them.
Nigel begins with the very first picture by the entrance into the ‘Bruegel’ room at the museum. Wedding Dance in the Open Air. Music is mimetic: it imitates things. Nigel depicts the sound and movement of a joyful village wedding dance. It’s a well-watered one too. While the families haggle over the dowery and the trousseau at a table at the back of the picture, cheerfully lusty couples dance to the music of two bagpipe players leaning against a tree on the right. One of them is armed with a short sword, a poniard. T.S. Eliot described joyful dancers just like these in East Coker: “Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, /Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth/Mirth of those long since under earth.’ [i]
The Adoration of the Magi is the most mysterious picture here. This is in part, because of the colour is faded; at first sight, it’s almost disappearing into the rough canvas on which it is painted. Nigel answers with delicacy, a lyrical flickering. For me this is a reminded that the ‘Wise men from the East’ were probably devotees of Parthian cult of Zoroaster, for whom fire was the symbol of light and purity. But there’s artistic layering too: the roof of the dilapidated stable reflects the shack in Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Adoration’ Triptych. This painting was in Bruegel’s hometown, Antwerp, until 1574, when it was acquired by Philip II of Spain. Armed soldiers lurk to the side of the painting: reminders of the massacre the journey of the Magi precipitates and the dangerous times in which the Bruegels lived.
Like so many British teenagers, I knew The Fall of Icarus and, I later discovered, the room where it hangs, long before I saw it. This was thanks to W H Auden’s poem ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, which he wrote on a visit to Brussels in 1938. Standing in the eponymous museum (his title was the French moniker for the Royal Museums of Fine Arts), I realised that the poem is about this space. Looking around the room, the poet made his observation about tragedy, ‘how everything turns away /Quite leisurely from the disaster.’[ii]
Bruegel includes the whole cast of rural characters in Ovid’s retelling of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, in the Metamorphoses: ‘Now some fisherman spies them, angling for fish with his flexible rod, or a shepherd, leaning upon his crook, or a plowman, on his plow-handles – spies them and stands stupefied’.[iii] Nigel explicitly represents Icarus’s frantic attempt to remain aloft on melting pinions, and the screams of his ‘unhappy father, no longer a father’[iv]. Unlike Ovid, Brueghel’s countryfolk remain aloof, and (as Auden puts it) ‘the expensive delicate ship that must have seen /Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, /Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.’[v] There’s a sheathed dagger, like the piper’s poniard in the wedding dance, by the plough. We are repeatedly reminded that the countryside is only ever one step away from violence.
The Fall of the Rebel Angels took Nigel and I back to an earlier collaboration: his concerto, Black Fire was based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, which like Breughel, referenced medieval and Renaissance storytelling of the ‘War in Heaven’. Bruegel’s fantastic chaos of tumbling demons, Satan-as-Hydra-Cerberus pursued by an anorexic St Michael and righteous angels, satisfied a market for work in the style of Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch, like Bruegel, used the foundations provided by Dante’s Inferno. Like the Wedding Dance in the Open Air, this miniature conjures up the noise and musics of Bruegel’s painting. There are trumpets everywhere. Angels play what look like Roman curved bucinae. To the lower left, over the most explicit fart in painting, are two rasping, reedy, instruments – a long shawm and a hurdy gurdy. As Dante says of demon in Canto XXI of Inferno: ‘elli avea del cul fatto trompetta’ (He made a trumpet of his arse).[vi]
Winter Landscape with Bird Trap srevolutionary, the only painting in this room whose subject is neither humans nor immortals. For this is the first true landscape painting, the beginning of an extraordinary journey, which leads (for this Brit) through Ruysdael, Claude Lorrain, Constable, Wordsworth, Rousseau and Corot, to the dark pastorals of Vaughan Williams, Wilfred Owen, Paul Nash (on the road to abstraction). Human experience is here – particularly cold and hunger, but no story, no analogy, no personalities. This is the closest an early painting comes to the absolute nature of instrumental music, without words, religion, myth or devotion. Nigel calls on Nature’s collaborators for help: this is the first appearance of a flock of birds which flit and twitter around his cycle. Listen carefully, the cold is evoked by a phrase from Vivaldi’s Winter.
The Numbering at Bethlehem (1) takes place in an imperial environment. These villagers are paying taxes in in a land not their own. The score reminds me that this second winter scene shows Bethlehem as a village in Habsburg-ruled Brabant. Hanging over the tavern where the enrolment is taking place are the arms of Charles V or Philip II of (ruler by the time this painting was made), complete with double headed eagle, the Order of the Golden Fleece and a glimpse, of the flower of Imperial Spain – the black-centred Red Carnation. Nigel’s music hovers between the subtle representation of cold, and of two tragedies this subject pre-figures; the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Crucifixion: a tolling motif is heard on the mournful viola,
In the centre of the room, two small pictures hang together. Performing in front of them, they become a diptych. The first, Fragment of a Kermis: the Procession seems to have been cut down from a large painting of a village festival (complete versions by Pieter the Younger survive). A small figure of Saint Cornelius (he holds a horn – ‘Cornelius’ means ‘battle horn) is carried in procession by banner-waving peasants. His shrine in at Denderbelle, East Flanders was a destination of pilgrimage. This Kermis is probably for his Saint’s Day, September 16th. The stripe-edged banners being waved match those rolled up in ‘Return of the Pilgrims’ in Book Two. Nigel’s music is miniature, almost Lilliputian. We can only just hear the march in the distance.
To the modern mind, the next small painting, The Yawning Man might represent tiredness, or ennui. From the late Renaissance point of view, something more judgemental is being essayed, and the science of physiognomy is at work. This is one of the Seven Deadly Sins- ‘Sloth’ or ‘Acedia’. Such spiritual lassitude, apathy, boredom are perilous – our yawner is on the torpid path to hell. This is Nigel at his most mimetic, onomatopoeic even: the music sounds like a yawn looks like and sounds like. It’s an opportunity for satirical tautology, which the composer relishes. The yawner pops up in different garbs, throughout the cycle: he’s in the very first movement and the very last.
When I first played The Massacre of the Innocents in the gallery, it was apparent this is the heart of Book One of Brueg[h]el’s Brush. Nigel spoke movingly to audiences about facing the challenge of how to respond (how to compose!) to such unimaginable horror. His answer was to look for the quietest sadness in the picture – just off centre. Here a mother sits with her dead baby on her lap, her hands in clasped in grief and prayer. Bruegel had been to Rome, and he would have seen the impossibly idealised beauty of Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’, with the Virgin cradling the dead Christ. This is the reality of infanticide. The original version of Pieter Bruegel’s painting, now in the Royal Collection in London, proved too much for the melancholy Emperor (and Brueghel collector) Rudolf II in Prague. He ordered the murdered toddlers painted over, sanitised with parcels and bundles of produce.
The room of eleven paintings, and this first book of eleven pieces, are finely poised between two similar pictures. In both, depictions of The Numbering at Bethlehem, an enrolment for Imperial taxation (be it Roman or Habsburg) takes place. In both a pig is slaughtered, and a population likewise bled dry in the snows of winter (Christmas garlands hang in both pictures). But between the two artists the aesthetic is in flux. Pieter Brueghel the Younger was only four years old when his father died. He somehow picked up his torch and carried the family imprimatur into the 17th century. Like him, Nigel uses almost the same material for The Numbering at Bethlehem (2), and tells the same story, but with subtle differences: we are now on the violin, and in the aftermath of the Massacre of the Innocents. There is a new sense of resignation. But most importantly, nature offers comfort: birds from Winter Landscape with Bird Trap have come to sing joyfully, just as they are more visible in the leafless trees of Pieter the Younger’s painting than his father’s.
The Battle of Carnival and Lent brings Book One to a close, and in situ, full circle in the room. The painting is overwhelming: it is almost too much for me, and I need the composer’s clarity to lead me through. Like the picture, Nigel presents a riotous free-for-all, a ‘quodlibet’, looking back- and for-wards in the cycle: pastoral melody from Fall of Icarus appears as fanfares, the Yawning Man theme runs amok, great shell bursts from The Fall of the Rebel Angels shake the very frame of the picture. This whirling ‘Dance Reel’ (as marked), winds up to a maddened tarantella, with more than a feeling of Nordic ‘hardangar’ fiddle-playing. Of all the paintings, this is surely the noisiest – there are guitars, flutes and drums, bagpipes, a griddle being scraped with a knife, a ‘Rommelpot’, a metal shovel being banged, and singing, and dancing and shouting, as hunger and excess depicted in the painting do battle.
The Good Shepherd was the first miniature Nigel wrote when we began work on the project, and the first to be played in public, in Zagreb in 2025. The image churchgoers normally associated with this description of Jesus is milksop peaceful. The Brueg[h]els were cognisant of the perils of shepherding, just as Jesus was clear about the danger depicted here: ‘the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.’[vii] Nigel reaches out to Beethoven, Vivaldi and Prokofiev to illuminate his story. The pastoral idyll of the Fall of Icarus is recalled, with a high-lying rendering of the theme of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Under this the ‘la caccia’(hunt) from Vivaldi’s Autumn is plucked. Both are menaced by the wolf from Peter and Wolf, as the deadly conflict begins.
The Penitent Mary Magdalene seems to be a collaboration with Hendrick van Balen the Elder. The subject and presentation, echo an earlier work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: ‘Magdalena Poenitens’ survives in engraving by Joannes & Lucas van Doetecum. In this, the prayerful, Magdalene meditates on a crucifix and a skull, in rustic enclosure/cave.
Both the music and painting hint at the sinful (perhaps joyful) earlier life of which Mary Magdalene repents. There are libidinous rabbits, and in the music, bracketed memories are marked ‘dancing’. The venom of sin is drawn out by beautiful blue cornflowers, symbols of purity: in classical myth the centaur Chiron used this flower to staunch his wounds. Musical absolution comes to Mary with mysterious harmonics, marked ‘with purity’.
In his poem W.H. Auden wrote: ‘About suffering they were never wrong, /The Old Masters: how well they understood/Its human position’.[viii] This is explicit in Jan Brueghel the Younger’s Calvary. It is a day of rainstorm and sunburst: In the middle distance the Crucifixion is illuminated, stranded, amid a vast crowd, fighting and arguing, indifferent and cruel. Far away, there are Bosch-like gibbets and corpses, and in the foreground human and animal bones, identifying ‘Golgotha/Place of the Skull’. At the heart of the composition, a heartbroken Virgin is comforted by Mary Magdalene and beardless St John, the ‘disciple that Jesus Loved’. Nigel returns to the viola, as the more compassionate instrument. There are great yawps of outrage at such cruelty, but an exquisite melody, marked ‘Melancholia’ offers some kind of absolution: (perhaps a hint of Bach – ‘Comfort ye/Ebarme Dich’). Meanwhile Auden notes: ‘the dogs go on with their doggy life’, playing, gnawing at bones.
Nigel’s music, and Brueghel’s painting for The Wine of St Martins Day Kermis celebrate the debauchery this erstwhile ‘Old Hallowe’en’ (November 11th) offered. The second week of November marked the end of the harvest season, and a chance to sample the new wine. On the the right hand of the painting Saint Martin making his rather curmudgeonly offer of half of his robe, to a beggar. In the centre a seething mass of villagers crowd around a vast tun of wine, with mugs, cups and bowls, clearly drinking themselves to oblivion. The music is full of revelry, lurching, yahoo-ing, and the inevitable vomit (you can hear the Yawning Man is at the revels!).
Two similar paintings by Jan Breughel the Younger, Aneas in Hell and Aeneas in the Underworld depict Virgil’s hero’s journey, in the Aeneid.[ix] In the first, Aeneas is led by the Cumean Sibyl under ‘a huge, dark elm’ (ulmus opaca, ingens), and surrounded by the monsters Virgil describes. Jan reaches back to his grandfather, Pieter the Elder, as he reaches back to Hieronymus Bosch: the demons and tortured souls recall the tumbling figures of Fall of the Rebel Angels (1490), which reach for Bosch’s depiction of the horrors of Hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights. These layered collaborations and typologies inspire our composer.
Nigel’s first ‘Aeneas’ miniature evokes the mysterious descent, the rustle of the ‘Golden Bough’ Aeneas cut from the grove of Diana Nemorensis to gain admission to Hell. He asks for intricate filigree extended techniques: delicate tremolos recall Berlioz’s ‘idée fixe’ from the Symphonie Fantastique, plus three-part chords, while simultaneous left-hand pizzicato plays a countermelody behind the fingers. Then the music explodes into the horrors of Hades. The second miniature continues to descend from violin to viola, and the screams of the damned are heard, as they depart. There is one identifiable shade in both paintings – Dido, wearing a yellow dress. This is the first time that Aneas learns her fate after abandoning her in Carthage. Virgile writes; ‘dulcique adfatus amore est’ (he spoke to her tenderly and lovingly). [x]And then she is led away with the other suicide – as the end of Nigel’s second piece is whisked off to the horizon.
Nigel’s setting and Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s depiction of the Adoration of the Magi in the Snow recall Lancelot Andrewes’s line, which T.S. Eliot used to begin ‘The Journey of the Magi’: ‘A cold coming we had of it, /Just the worst time of the year /For a journey, and such a long journey.’ This encapsulates much of what Nigel evokes, and requests – ‘sofferenza’ (suffering). [1] Nigel notes the child joyfully skating in a cow’s jawbone; marked ‘con innocenza’ in the score. But there is a cartload of armoured soldiers just visible, under crenelated castle walls: the Wise Men’s angel-advised decision not to bring news of the Messiah to Herod, Roman client-king of Masada, results in the murder of all the children. The sorrowing chorales of Massacre of the Innocents now morph into tortured glacial dissonances, and any memory of playing children evaporates. It is a story told too many times in recent history.
Landscape itself, offers respite, rural balm. The bow set aside, the viola becomes a lute, a harp, or even a plucked viola da gamba, reflecting on the painting’s celebration of the beauty, of the simple life in the accompanying painting on copper. A river flows towards us, graced with Yellow Iris (Iris pseudacorus) or ‘Water Flag’. This is the historic symbol of the city and region of Brussel, celebrated on ‘Iris Day’, May 8th. A man and woman go about their daily chores by the water: she’s washing laundry, he’s fishing. The clean sheets are carried over a bridge to bleach on the tenter-grounds of the village. A Dog plays happily, and a cock crows on the roof next to a tavern. It’s a beautiful May morning and all is well in the peaceable Kingdom of Brabant.
Collaboration is vital to Clarke’s work as a composer. He finds a counterpoint between his long-term partnerships with performers and the over layering work amongst the Bruegel family, and later, between Jan Bruegel and Rubens in Antwerp. When I was spending a lot of time in Den Haag in 1989-1990, I fell in love with their ‘The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man’ at the Mauritshuis. This Virgin with the Periwinkle feels as if it was set in their Garden of Eden. The beauty of the work that Rubens and Jan Brueghel did together has always moved me deeply.
Here are two kinds of flowers for the Virgin Mary: White and pink roses, symbolise her identity as the ‘Mystic Rose’. In Bruegel’s time this as linked with the hymn ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’. The five-petalled Blue Periwinkle (Vinca Major) was planted in ‘Mary Gardens’ as a meditation on the Virgin’s purity and grace. Nigel’s music points out the tragedy here. We meditated on a mother’s pain in the Massacre of the Innocents. The descending dissonances from that movement return: yet again, the Christ Child is on his mother’s lap, morphing into another ‘Pietà’.
Looking at Jan Bruegel the Elder’s ‘River Landscape’, Nigel points out his subtle depiction of reflections. The great water and maritime painters of the ensuing centuries did not give so much attention to this: it took Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia the early 1870s to systemise what we see – the challenge of photography made reality impossible to ignore. Breughel and Nigel both toy with the ‘not-quite-the-sameness’ of the watery ‘upside-down-world’. His rising octatonic rills are offset by cascades of C# minor arpeggios. Talking with Andrezj Panufnik about his 3rd String Quartet in 1990, he noted, that to hear or see a reflection, the brain needed it to be just ‘not-quite-the-same’. Stand in front of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère at the Courtauld Gallery, and you will see the same game that Nigel and Jan Brueghel are playing. Refraction, displacement, offset – be it phrase or pattern.
Between two landscapes, Nigel offers the exact opposite – Still Life with Flower Garland and Tazza. Here is fascinating contrast, between the transient beauty of nature and the apparently solid human creation of precious objects: jewellery, draped over an open box, filled with gold coins. Jan Breughel painted this subject, using the same ornamental stemmed dish, the ‘tazza’ and the same jewellery box, a number of times. The flowers are very much summer blooms, and in the centre of the draped bouquet is a black-centred red carnation: the flower which Philip II confirmed as a symbol the flower of Spain. When he married the Elisabeth de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Medici in 1559, a violin was sent with her, made by Andrea Amati (father of the maker of the instrument heard on this recording). It was decorated with Philip’s escutcheon, bordered with the same red-black carnations.
Roughly at the same time that this painting was made, Jan Brueghel’s friend and collaborator, Peter Paul Rubens, made a family portrait of Jan with his children, Pieter and Elisabeth, and his wife Catharina. Young Pieter points to the bracelet that she is wearing, the same one in the jewellery box in Jan’s still life.
Undergrowth with Figures is the last landscape in the cycle. Nigel pointed out a deliberate obscurity in the painting, something hidden. What appears to be undergrowth in a glade of massive Oak trees, is actually dozens of figures: a cluster of mounted soldiers with foliage in their helmets, an early representation of a Native American, a character in a Chinese hat, and, in the distance there’s a religious procession, leading oxen to sacrifice. But the people are not the story – rather they fade into, are the landscape. Two centuries later Turner would bring this conceit, of gatherings of humans morphing into fog or foliage, to its apogee. What Brueghel has done, and Nigel evokes so delicately is to draw a golden chain between that, and his father’s Landscape with Bird Trap
In his tiny Kermis fragment (No. 7), Nigel conjured up the in-the-distance impression of pilgrims to St Cornelius shrine, waving their red-and-white festival banners. The St Martin’s Day festivities, eight miniatures (two months later), offered the ribald reality of such religious get-togethers! Return of the Pilgrims seems to show the devotees of St Cornelius on the road home, their banners rolled up and stowed. Most of them are dancing home, to the playing of the (dagger-wearing) bagpiper from Wedding Dance in the Open Air. In the background there are ballgames, a church festival and a round dance in the village square. It is (as Nigel instructs the player) ‘buccolico’.
Nigel finishes his cycle with with the unashamedly profane The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne’ by Jan Brueghel the Elder (with Hendrick van Balen). This shows the nuptials of Ariadne (abandoned on Naxos by perfidious Theseus). It is a riot of miniature imagery. Breughel clearly knew of Titian’s celebrated painting of the subject, hanging in the Palazzo d’Este, Ferrara, when his father visited Italy (It is now in the National Gallery, London). Breughel’s painting is loosely based on it, with Ariadne and the sea/sky to the left, Bacchus and the forest to the right. Breughel casts Titian’s restraint to the winds, with a bacchanale of contradictions: Ariadne emerges from the sea with Tritons trumpeting. A weed-covered river-god rises from the water at the bottom of the picture. Up on the right, Titian’s gorgeous Bacchus has been replaced by a dissipated, age-ing putto … is it possible that there is a hint of the punishment of Theseus with his black sails on the horizon? Even the viewer feels too drunk to tell.
Nigel evokes all this with a whirl of violinist-ic carousing, back to the peasant wedding where we began. Listen out for the yawning man, the garlands of flowers, Icarus falling into the ocean and more. These riotous revels, bring us and the Bruegels, back home.
[1] T S Eliot, The Journey of the Magi, 1927
[i] ‘East Coker, T S Eliot, Faber and Faber London, 1942 -check reference
[ii] W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” from Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1979 by W. H. Auden.
[iii] Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VII,
[iv] Loeb, book 1 p423
[v] t: W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” from Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson.
[vi] Dante Alighieri (Inferno, Canto XXI, v. 139)
[vii] John 10 11-13, King James Bible
[viii] W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” from Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson.
[ix] Virgil, Aeneid (Book 6, lines 282–283),
[x] Virgil, Aeneid (Book 6, line 455).