The Courtauld Gallery has a small Bruegel exhibition showing three of his very rare grisaille paintings side by side. The gallery is also displaying other Bruegel drawings in the collection, along with copies and some fakes (good drawings, but made to deceive).

The Wedding Dance (detail), Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1566

We have to be careful we know which Bruegel we are talking about because there are a few in the family, all artists. The one doing the grisaille is Pieter Bruegel the Elder, famous for his "peasant" scenes: idiosyncratic and often charming (see right). He had two sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder, with Peiter spending most of his artistic life copying his father, whilst Jan did a lot of still-life and landscape painting (and sometimes collaborated with Rubens, another artist well represented at The Courtauld).

Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery,
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

A grisaille is a black and white painting (perhaps with some umber as well) often thought to be used as a preliminary underpainting for a finished work in full colour oil. His Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery was highly praised, and a picture he like so much that he never parted with it.

One of the things I noticed this visit was how good the Tiepolo San Pascual oil sketches are. In the early 1770's, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was in Madrid and commissioned by King Charles III of Spain to paint some altarpieces for the church of San Pascual in Aranjuez. Apparently, the King was not impressed with the finished works and they were removed from the church and lost or destroyed (horrendous to think of the loss now). The surviving sketches are wonderful though.

Shown below is the Immaculate Conception of 1767. Size is 60 x 40 cm (roughly), so fairly small (On the right is a close-up). The style is fluid and accomplished, quite modern and beautiful.