The Beggars

Five men on crutches shuffle across a sunlit courtyard, each wearing a hat that mocks a rank of society: crown, helmet, cap, mitre, beret. It is one of Bruegel's smallest surviving paintings, and its riddle has never been fully solved.

The story behind the painting

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Beggars, also called The Cripples, in 1568, near the end of his career, a time when he showed a keener interest in the natural world. The panel is tiny, only 18.5 by 21.5 cm, among his smallest known surviving works. The Netherlands at the time was in turmoil under Spanish rule, on the way to the Dutch Revolt. Some have tried to link the picture to a real event: the fox or badger tails on the beggars' clothes might refer to the Gueux, a rebel party formed against Philip II of Spain and Granvelle. But the same tails already appear in Bruegel's Fight Between Carnival and Lent of 1559, so the link is uncertain.

What to look for

Five physically impaired men move on crutches across a courtyard enclosed by red-brick walls. Their headgear looks like carnival costume: a cardboard crown for the king, a paper shako for the soldier, a beret for the burgher, a cap for the peasant and a mitre for the bishop. Foxtails hang from their clothes. In the background a woman in an apron walks away carrying a bowl, seemingly indifferent. Through the opening in the wall, small as it is, a landscape glows in a delicate light that seems to shimmer like dew on the leaves. On the back of the panel are two old inscriptions, one in Flemish, now fragmentary, and one in Latin.

Meaning and intent

The work clearly has a satirical meaning, though it has so far eluded a sure interpretation. Perhaps the physical impairments stand for moral decay, which can strike anyone regardless of class. In the 16th century foxtails were linked with deceit, hypocrisy and social exclusion, and were used to ridicule people in caricature and in real life. Modern viewers may feel the painting invites sympathy, but historians think that unlikely: people in Bruegel's time had little regard for beggars, and the figures are placed outside the town walls and posed in ways meant to provoke contempt and amusement. Seeing it through both eyes, ours and theirs, is part of its unsettling power.

Legacy

The Latin inscription on the back records a humanist's admiration for Bruegel, whose art, it says, surpasses Nature itself. That a viewer in his own century felt moved to write praise on the panel shows how prized his skill already was. Art historians today read the painting both as a stark, realistic record of disability in the early modern Netherlands and as a complex satire aimed at the political and religious unrest of the time. The Beggars entered the Louvre in Paris as a gift in 1892, and it remains the only painting by Bruegel in the Louvre's collection.