The Visit at the Leasehold Farm

Here the son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Elder, picks up the thread of one of his father’s compositions: a landlord visiting a tenant. On the right are the landlord and his wife, dressed in the style favoured by Antwerp’s patricians; the clothes worn by their servants on the right also differ from the peasants’ more colourful and less elaborate attire. The landlord’s gift is a sugar loaf, probably intended to mark the birth of the youngest child, who the mother is keeping warm by the fire on the left.