1508 - Amsterdam - 1575
Oil on Panel, 33 ¼ x 44 ¾ inches 84.5 x 113.7 cm.
"Lange Pier" (because of his great height) was almost certainly born in Amsterdam. He became a pupil of Allart Claesz. of whom nothing is documented and whom he left at the age of eighteen in order to travel throughout the Netherlands; but there is no evidence of a voyage to Italy. In 1535 he went to Antwerp where he lived with Jan Mandyn, a follower of H. Bosch (1). He joined the Guild of St Luke and became a full citizen of Antwerp in 1542. In that year he married Kathelijne Beukelaer, the aunt of his pupil Joachim. But innumerable commissions seem to have encouraged him to emigrate back to his native Amsterdam in 1555 where he became a citizen in 1563.
He painted many religious pictures and altarpieces, which were mostly destroyed by the iconoclasts and now mostly survive, if at all, only in fragmentary form. In any case his importance today lies chiefly in that at a time when most of the Netherlands were being more and more influenced by Roman motifs, he stuck more firmly than most to a national style which was to become the Dutch.
He concentrated on the lives of the peasants, and his painting works through powerful draughtsmanship and modelling as well as a strong colour sense that is starkly differentiated from those mannerist styles, often regarded as rather decadent, which were fashionable at the time. His depictions of peasant life show a clear understanding of the people, but unlike Pieter Breughel he is always purely descriptive, with neither a trace of irony nor didacticism, nor on the other hand any of the salaciousness and piquanterie of Hemessen and his own son Pieter Pietersz..
The work of Aertsen has occasionally been directly compared and indeed contrasted to that of Pieter Breughel the Elder, and his occasional inversion of still life elements with the religious narrative have even been described as "Mannerist" in its own way. But in fact his painting technique is formally closer to the gothicism of Bosch (probably via Mandyn) than to Breughel, while his brush work and colours are bolder and more 'realistic'.
Van Mander in his long article describes his realistic painting of a meat stall 'with the flayed head of an ox, just as seen on the slab of a butcher'. The oxhead theme, which is itself a religious symbol from antiquity, recurs many times in his work. He used and repeated certain images throughout his life in different paintings at widely different times. Here the animal is happily alive, in other paintings it is dead, or even flayed.
There are several related paintings, none identical as far as is known.
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