Most alchemy pictures from the sixteenth century show wise men at work. Pieter Bruegel's is a satire about what that work cost. The engraving, published around 1558, is crowded with a messy workshop, a bubbling crucible, scattered tools, and an alchemist in torn clothes who is feeding the fire with the last of the family's money.
The visual joke starts with his wife. She stands next to him with an empty purse turned inside out, and the gesture says it all. The coins are gone into the furnace. Behind them, a scholar with a book points out the next ingredient, urging the alchemist on, and the whole room is a mess of broken pots and fumes.
Through the window at the right is the punchline. The alchemist's family is walking to the poorhouse, wearing the clothes of paupers. That is where all the experiments lead. In the Dutch caption of the print, the word for alchemist is broken into a pun, Alghe-mist, which in Dutch reads close to a phrase meaning that everything is lost.
Bruegel was not the only artist mocking alchemy, but he did it with the best eye for detail. Look at the dozens of small, wonderful things: the strange glass vessels, the piles of junk, and the fools in the background. The room is a world of its own.
It also fits his other work. Bruegel liked proverbs and the follies they describe, and the alchemist is a classic one: the man chasing a dream so hard that he cannot see what it destroys.
Bruegel's The Alchemist appears on our: