拍品专文
Comparable in subject and in handling of the background to a drawing in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg, F. Anzelewsky, P. Dreyer, L. Malke, H. Mielke, K. Renger and M. Winner, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. als Zeichner, Herkunft und Nachfolge, exhib. cat., Berlin, 1975, no. 118, fig. 223. Brueghel painted a number of pictures of this subject: the earliest, dated 1601, is in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625), Cologne, 1979, no. 80), another, dated 1604, is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden; and two undated pictures are in the Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe and in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Ertz, op. cit., nos. 107, 59 and 99 respectively. Winner dates the Hamburg drawing to circa 1600, to which Ertz disagrees. In his article Neubestimmtes und Unbestimmtes im zeichnerischen Oeuvre von Jan Brueghel d. Ä., Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, Neue Folge 14, 1972, p. 144, fig. 23, Matthias Winner first attributed the drawing of The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (inv. no. 115) to Jan Brueghel the Elder. The handling of the figures in that drawing and in the The Crossing of the Red Sea in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Winner, op.cit., fig. 25) is comparable to that of the present lot.