Man counting money (Greed)

Brouwer's Man Counting Money, subtitled Greed, belongs to the tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins as genre subjects — a framework that gave Netherlandish artists moral cover for depicting characters engaged in vices their audiences found perversely enjoyable. The subject was already venerable by 1630, with precedents in Quinten Massys's moneylender panels and Marinus van Reymerswaele's grotesque tax collectors. Brouwer's approach, however, is less interested in caricature than in psychological observation: his miser is not a comic monster but an absorbed, almost pathetic figure whose entire being has contracted around the counting of coins. The Bryan Gallery of Christian Art collection reflects the work's long afterlife as a moral exemplum — images of avarice served Protestant as well as Catholic instructional purposes. Brouwer's capacity to charge a tiny panel with genuine moral weight, without resorting to allegory or symbol beyond the coins themselves, marks the sophistication beneath his apparently rough subject matter.

On an oak panel, Brouwer concentrates the entire composition on the figure's hands and downturned face, both lit by the same implied candlelight that illuminates the coins. The money is rendered with unusual precision — individual discs catching light — while the surrounding space remains undefined, directing all attention to the act of counting. Warm glazes over the base layer give the figure's skin an unhealthy yellowish tinge appropriate to the subject's moral condition.