Pieter Breughel the Younger

Pieter Breughel the Younger

Detail map of Gent, Vlaanderen, Belgium Overview map of Gent, Vlaanderen, Belgium

A: Gent, Vlaanderen, Belgium

Depiction of Record Keeping by Pieter Breughel the Younger

1620 to 1640
The Village Lawyer by Pieter Breughel the Younger.

The Village Lawyer by Pieter Breughel the Younger.

A painting by Pieter Breughel the Younger, of which one copy dated 1621 entitled the Village Lawyer is in the Museum voor Schone Kunster, Ghent, Belgium, and another copy dated 1620-40, and entitled Paying the Tax is in the Armand Hammer collection at the Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, caricatures the way paper accounting or legal records were maintained at the time, but reflects the filing methods accurately. Records are shown in piles of bundles on tables, in bundles on shelves, labeled sacks of bundles hanging on walls, in sheets of paper bundled together that may be tacked up on walls, and in piles on the floor. They filed the papers as well as they could at the time, but things were apparently on the verge of getting out of control.

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