Le Christ et la femme adultère

A small grey panel, a crowd, a frightened woman, and Christ bending to write in the dust. Bruegel kept this picture all his life, and four centuries later it was stolen and missing for ten years.

The story behind the painting

Pieter Bruegel the Elder signed and dated this small panel in 1565. It tells the episode from John 8 in which a woman accused of adultery is brought before Jesus by Pharisees and scribes. The crime was punishable by stoning, but Jesus stoops and writes on the ground: he that is without sin among you, let him first cast the stone at her. Bruegel wrote those words in Dutch at her feet. The artist never sold the painting, and it seems to be the only one inherited by his son Jan Brueghel the Younger.

What to look for

The panel is tiny, about 24.1 by 34.4 cm, and painted in grisaille, almost without colour, in tones of grey. Find the words written on the floor, and then the stones that were never thrown, lying to the woman's left. The woman herself is one of the few graceful figures in the scene, idealised in a way unusual for Bruegel, whose women are usually earthy and homely. The layout is Netherlandish, but the austere composition and monumental figures have been called perhaps the most Italianate in all of Bruegel's paintings.

Meaning and intent

Grisaille was rare in Bruegel's surviving work. Besides this panel, only an even smaller Three Soldiers in the Frick Collection and The Death of the Virgin at Upton House survive, the latter also an unusually conventional religious subject for him. Yet his earliest documented work, in Mechelen in 1550 and 1551, was grisaille wings for an altarpiece by Peeter Baltens, now lost. The grey palette strips the story to its moral core: mercy confronting judgement, with the accusers left holding stones they cannot throw.

Legacy

Paul Perret published an engraving of it in 1579, and pricks along the edges suggest a grid for copying. Copies followed, some attributed to Bruegel's sons, including one by Pieter Brueghel the Younger of about 1600 in Philadelphia, and the panel was lent to Cardinal Federico Borromeo for copying. Sold by the family in the seventeenth century, it reached England, was sold at Christie's in 1834 and 1952, and was bought by Count Antoine Seilern, whose collection went to the Courtauld in 1978. Stolen from the Courtauld Gallery on 2 February 1982, it was unsaleable and was recovered by British police in 1992.