Netherlandish Proverbs (The Blue Cloak)

Netherlandish Proverbs, also called The Blue Cloak or The Topsy-Turvy World, is an oil painting on oak panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, dated 1559; it has been in the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin since 1914, when it was bought from an English collection.

Collections of proverbs were widely popular in Bruegel's time; Erasmus had published his Adagia, and Rabelais filled his Pantagruel with sayings. Bruegel had already treated the theme in prints and in the Twelve Proverbs panels of 1558, and in the same year Frans Hogenberg published an engraving of about forty labelled proverbs under the title The Blue Cloak, from which Bruegel borrowed a great deal. The Berlin panel is thought to be his first large painting on the subject.

A village by a river near the sea is crowded with figures who act out sayings literally. Some 126 proverbs and idioms have been identified, though others may be lost to changes in the language. Some are still familiar, such as banging one's head against a brick wall or being armed to the teeth. At the centre a woman in red hangs a blue cloak on her husband, meaning she is deceiving him; nearby a man carries daylight out in a basket, and the devil sits under a blue canopy hearing confession. An upside-down globe at upper left stands for a world turned upside down. Hogenberg's print suggested that The Blue Cloak could better be called The Folly of the World, and the painting catalogues human foolishness rather than simply illustrating sayings.

Bruegel's son Pieter Brueghel the Younger painted at least 16 copies, which vary in the proverbs shown and in other details; the Berlin panel is the original. It measures about 117 × 164 cm and appears on the cover of Fleet Foxes' 2008 debut album.