Anyone who has followed Old Master auctions in recent years will have found it increasingly difficult to overlook Abel and Jacob Grimmer. From Paris to New York, and most recently Vienna, strong works are not only carrying more ambitious estimates but are sometimes provoking remarkable bidding competition. The appeal is understandable: the Grimmers stand firmly within the great Antwerp landscape tradition of Bruegel, while their best paintings still occupy an entirely different price bracket.
On 28 April 2026, something happened at Dorotheum that caught our attention. A small panel by Jacob Grimmer, The Flight into Egypt, a Fortress Beyond, carried a cautious estimate of €15,000–20,000 ($17,000–23,000). The bidding only stopped at a purchase price of €109,200 ($127,000), including buyer’s premium.[1]
Immediately afterwards, another Jacob Grimmer came under the hammer. Same dimensions, same €15,000–20,000 ($17,000–23,000) estimate, and again from the former collection of the art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Landscape with Noli me tangere realised €78,000 ($91,000).[2] Two consecutive lots, each estimated at no more than €20,000, sold for almost €190,000 between them. That begins to look like a trend. And Vienna is not an isolated case.
The Grimmers Gain Momentum
Paris had already offered a striking indication of what might be happening in November 2022. At Artcurial’s sale of the collection of Baron and Baroness Vaxelaire, a group of Flemish paintings included particularly strong representation by Jacob and Abel Grimmer.
Jacob’s Castle in a Landscape with a Shepherd was estimated at €80,000–120,000 ($93,000–140,000) and sold for €164,000 ($191,000). An Allegory of the Seasons in a Landscape, estimated at €40,000–60,000 ($47,000–70,000), reached €78,720 ($92,000).[3] But Abel provided the standout result. A near-complete series of ten small circular panels depicting the months of the year, most signed and dated 1606, carried an estimate of €600,000–1 million ($699,000–1.17 million). The result was €1,538,400 ($1.79 million).[4]
These were not ten unrelated Grimmers that happened to have been assembled together. The panels remained together for generations before eventually entering the Vaxelaire collection. They are also included in Reine de Bertier de Sauvigny’s catalogue raisonné. Combinations such as these, long-standing provenance, a largely intact series, inclusion in the literature and an immediately recognisable subject, matter greatly.
Christie’s Paris added another result in March 2025. Abel Grimmer’s Spring, a small panel measuring approximately 31 by 43 centimetres, was estimated at €250,000–350,000 ($291,000–408,000). It realised €504,000 ($587,000), including buyer’s premium.[5]
On 5 February 2026, Sotheby’s sold Abel Grimmer’s signed and dated Interior of the Antwerp Cathedral of 1595. The estimate was approximately €172,000–258,000 ($200,000–300,000). The final price was around €676,000 ($787,400), including buyer’s premium.[6] The panel had a long and extensively documented provenance and had already been exhibited at the British Institution in 1857.
When a strong Grimmer comes to market, there is clearly a group of buyers prepared to bid well beyond the auction house’s expectations.
Why Grimmer?
The easy answer is Bruegel. The more interesting answer is that the Grimmers are far more than simply an affordable alternative.
Jacob Grimmer, born around 1525/26 and deceased around 1590, was almost an exact contemporary of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He belonged to the generation in which landscape painting in Antwerp developed from background setting into a subject in its own right. His son Abel, born around 1570, continued that tradition, but with his own preference for clearly structured villages, seasons, marketplaces, churches and rural activity.
In Abel Grimmer’s cycles of the months and seasons, motifs recur that build on prints and compositions by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hans Bol.[4] The same relationship can be seen in Abel’s A Winter Landscape with Skaters, sold in 2022 for €190,500 ($222,000). Figures and motifs connect with the pictorial world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, including his drawing of skaters near the Saint George’s Gate. Yet the result is unmistakably Grimmer: more compact, more lucidly organised and almost miniaturist in the way Flemish winter life is distributed across the landscape.[7]
The Price Gap with Brueghel
The financial context is nevertheless impossible to ignore. An important painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger now belongs to a different tier of the market. Christie’s sold his monumental The Tower of Babel in 2022 for approximately €2.21 million ($2.58 million).[8] And even that represents the secondary Brueghel market. Pieter Bruegel the Elder belongs to that category of artists whose important works have become effectively institutional: the core paintings are held in museums, and works available on the open market are exceedingly scarce.
That creates an interesting situation. A collector drawn to late-sixteenth-century Flemish landscapes, rolling vistas, castles, town outskirts, peasants, skaters and religious episodes almost casually embedded within scenes of everyday life, soon finds themselves within the same art-historical territory. The price changes dramatically, however, when the name on the label changes.
With Grimmer, that collector can also acquire a work by an independent artist rather than something catalogued as “follower of”, “circle of” or workshop production. The best examples may be signed, dated, supported by historic provenance and included in the standard literature. That distinction is becoming increasingly visible.
We would therefore not argue that collectors are buying Grimmer simply because they can no longer afford Brueghel. But the enormous price gap makes the comparison unavoidable. For collectors looking to spend several hundred thousand euros on high-quality sixteenth-century Flemish painting, Abel and Jacob Grimmer offer a combination of art-historical proximity, recognisability and relative accessibility that has largely disappeared from the market for the most celebrated names in the same tradition.
Small Panels, Expansive Worlds
Aesthetically, the Grimmers also sit remarkably comfortably with contemporary collecting habits. Many of their best paintings are not large. The two Jacob Grimmers that performed so strongly at Dorotheum in April each measure only 31.5 by 42.5 centimetres. Yet a great deal happens within those modest dimensions.
In Jacob’s paintings, a road may wind through a hilly landscape towards a fortress or town. A religious episode can be tucked away somewhere in the foreground without dominating the scene. Travellers move through the countryside, peasants work, trees structure the terrain and buildings draw the eye towards the horizon. The religious title can seem almost secondary. The landscape is the real subject.
With Abel, this ordering becomes even more pronounced. Village streets, church towers, walled towns and fields are arranged in clearly articulated zones of colour. The figures are small, but they give the surroundings scale and movement. As a result, the panels work both from a distance and at close quarters, a quality that may help explain why they sit so convincingly within modern collections.
A useful museum comparison is The Marketplace in Bergen op Zoom in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, now cautiously classified as “attributed to Abel Grimmer”. The marketplace, architecture, church tower, hill and fortifications form an almost cartographically organised world populated by dozens of small episodes of daily life. It is precisely this combination of architecture, topography and human detail that makes the best Grimmers so compelling.[9]
Provenance as a Catalyst
The recent results also demonstrate how important an object’s history can become as a market for an artist matures. The two Jacob Grimmers at Dorotheum in 2026 were with Jacques Goudstikker in Amsterdam in 1923. That same year, they were exhibited as works by Jacob Grimmer at the Anderson Galleries in New York. The Flight into Egypt, a Fortress Beyond is also accompanied by correspondence dating from 1995 from Reine de Bertier de Sauvigny, author of the standard catalogue on Jacob and Abel Grimmer.[1]
The series of ten months at Artcurial carried a Plantin-Moretus tradition and Vaxelaire provenance.[4] Sotheby’s Interior of the Antwerp Cathedral could be traced back to Lord George Cavendish and his descendants, had appeared in an exhibition as early as 1857 and has been extensively published.[6] These are three very different works, offered in three different countries, but they share one important characteristic: each comes with a substantial documentary record. And that is precisely the kind of material to which the market currently appears particularly receptive.
From the Margins to Names in Their Own Right
The coming years will show how far this reassessment extends. For now, what stands out is the speed with which the strongest results have followed one another. In 2022, Jacob Grimmer’s Castle in a Landscape with a Shepherd already exceeded its high estimate to reach €164,000 ($191,000). In the same sale, Abel Grimmer’s series of months crossed the €1.5 million mark.
Christie’s followed in 2025 with €504,000 for Spring. At the beginning of 2026, Sotheby’s reached approximately €676,000 ($787,400) for Interior of the Antwerp Cathedral. A few months later, Dorotheum saw two modestly estimated Jacob Grimmers climb to €109,200 and €78,000. These are no longer merely respectable results for specialists who have known the names for years.
An identifiable international price level is emerging for paintings that deliver precisely what the Grimmers do at their best: compress the Flemish world around 1600 into a panel that need hardly be larger than a sheet of paper. Bruegel continues to loom over this market. It could hardly be otherwise. The Grimmers worked within the same artistic geography, used related subject matter and helped carry forward the same revolutionary interest in landscape, the seasons and everyday life.
The most interesting development, however, is that buyers at recent auctions apparently no longer need to be told that Abel and Jacob Grimmer belong within that tradition. When the right painting appears, they bid for it.
Do you have a particular interest in this artist or in this subject?
Do you follow this artist, or have you come across a work you would like to know more about? We regularly research works appearing on the market and are always happy to exchange views on quality, provenance, art-historical context and previous auction results. You can contact us directly via info@antonello.art.
Notes and Sources
[1] Dorotheum, Old Master Paintings, Vienna, 28 April 2026, lot 32, Jacob Grimmer, The Flight into Egypt, a Fortress Beyond. Estimate €15,000–20,000; purchase price €109,200 including buyer’s premium.
[2] Dorotheum, Old Master Paintings, Vienna, 28 April 2026, lot 33, Jacob Grimmer, Landscape with Noli me tangere. Estimate €15,000–20,000; purchase price €78,000 including buyer’s premium.
[3] Artcurial, Collection baron & baronne Vaxelaire, Un hommage familial, Paris, 9 November 2022, lot 11, Jacob Grimmer, Castle in a Landscape with a Shepherd, and lot 13, Allegory of the Seasons in a Landscape. Realised prices €164,000 and €78,720 respectively.
[4] Artcurial, same sale, lot 12, Abel Grimmer, Ten Months of the Year, ten oil paintings on oak panel, most signed and dated 1606. Estimate €600,000–1,000,000; published result €1,538,400. See also R. de Bertier de Sauvigny, Jacob et Abel Grimmer: Catalogue Raisonné, Brussels, 1991.
[5] Christie’s, The Onzea-Govaerts Collection, Paris, 27 March 2025, lot 3, Abel Grimmer, Spring. Estimate €250,000–350,000; price including buyer’s premium €504,000.
[6] Sotheby’s, Light and Life: The Lester L. Weindling Collection, New York, 5 February 2026, lot 10, Abel Grimmer, Interior of the Antwerp Cathedral, 1595. Estimate $200,000–300,000; realised price $787,400 including buyer’s premium.
[7] Dorotheum, Old Master Paintings I, Vienna, 9 November 2022, lot 26, Abel Grimmer, A Winter Landscape with Skaters, oil on panel, 50 × 76 cm. Estimate €150,000–200,000; purchase price €190,500 including buyer’s premium.
[8] Christie’s, Old Masters, New York, 10 June 2022, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, The Tower of Babel. Realised price $2,580,000.
[9] National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Marketplace in Bergen op Zoom, probably 1590 and 1597, attributed to Abel Grimmer, oil on panel, 63.8 × 82.2 cm, inv. 1979.50.1.
