The Peasant and the Nest Robber

The Peasant and the Nest Robber (also called The Birdnester) is an oil painting on oak panel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, signed and dated 1568, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (GG 1020). The panel has been cut at the right and bottom and now measures 59.3 by 68.3 cm.

Painted the year before Bruegel's death, it belongs with late works such as The Land of Cockaigne, The Peasant Dance and The Peasant Wedding, in which a few large, monumental figures dominate the picture. Scholars, and the museum itself, see in these figures the influence of Italian art, in particular Michelangelo; it has even been suggested that the peasant's gesture is a profane parody of Leonardo's Saint John.

A man in peasant dress, filling about three quarters of the height of the panel, strides forward at the edge of a small stream with a stick in his right hand. With his left he points over his shoulder at a youth in bright red breeches who has climbed a tree behind him, his feet hooked around a fork, and is reaching into a bird's nest. Trees fill the left side; on the right the view opens across a field to a farmstead on the horizon. The signature BRVEGEL M.D.LXVIII, at lower left in gold, has been renewed.

The scene has traditionally been linked to a Flemish proverb inscribed on Bruegel's drawing The Beekeepers: he who knows where the nest is has the knowledge, he who robs it has the nest. On that reading the peasant points out the nest without noticing it being robbed. Others have objected that the proverb does not explain the picture satisfactorily, noting that the peasant seems about to step into the stream. The museum leaves the question open: perhaps both men are about to fall, one from the tree and the other into the water.