The Four Elements: Air. A Poultry Market with the Prodigal Son in the Background

Part of Beuckelaer's celebrated Four Elements series completed in 1569–1570 and now divided between the National Gallery in London, this Air panel uses a poultry market as its elemental emblem. Birds — the creatures of air — appear in extraordinary profusion: live hens in crates, plucked carcasses hanging, feathers drifting. The Four Elements series represents the most ambitious and coherent programmatic statement Beuckelaer ever produced, a secular encyclopaedia of natural abundance organized by classical cosmology. Air corresponds to birds and markets dealing in them. In the background, Beuckelaer inserts the Prodigal Son episode, a reference to squandered wealth that gives the elemental abundance a moralising dimension. The series demonstrates how an Antwerp painter could satisfy simultaneously the humanist collector's taste for learned iconographic programmes and the broader market's appetite for naturalistic genre painting. The four canvases were designed as a set and have been in the National Gallery since the nineteenth century.

Canvas support for this large-scale work allows broad, confident handling. Beuckelaer organises the poultry with remarkable attention to variety — different breeds, different states of preparation — each handled with specific textural brushwork distinguishing feathers, skin, and plucked flesh. The blue sky and cloud formations that suggest open air behind the market stall are thinly glazed. The Prodigal Son narrative in the background is painted with soft, hazy handling that creates pictorial recession.