Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), Flemish painter and draughtsman, active in Antwerp and Brussels. He is noted for his landscape paintings and drawings, religious subjects, allegories, and scenes of robust peasant life. He was the senior member, and by far the most important, of a family of artists that remained active well into the 17th century.

Bruegel's art is often seen as the last phase in the development of a long tradition of Netherlandish painting that began with Jan van Eyck in the 15th century. This tradition transformed the stylization of medieval art into a more realistic rendering of the world. Bruegel painted minutely observed scenes of daily life among the Netherlandish peasantry and episodes from the Bible set in contemporary northern European landscapes and townscapes.

Bruegel is thought to have come from the town of Breda, located in northern Brabant in present-day Holland. Born Pieter Brueghel, he later dropped the “h” from his name. He seems to have studied with Pieter Coecke in Brussels and worked for a short time in Malines. He became a member of the painters' guild in Antwerp in 1551. After a trip to Italy between 1552 and 1555, Bruegel returned to Antwerp. In 1563 he married Coecke's daughter, Maria Coecke van Aelst, and moved to Brussels, where he remained until his death in September 1569. Their two children, Pieter the Younger and Jan, both became painters of some renown.

Bruegel's earliest works were landscapes, an interest he retained throughout his life. A number of panoramic landscape drawings made on his Italian trip—for example, those preserved in Berlin (1552, Staatliche Museen) and in London (1553, British Museum)—show Bruegel's ability, even in his early career, to capture the mood of changing seasons and the atmospheric qualities of nature. These same characteristics appear in his later landscape paintings, such as Hunters in the Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and Magpie on the Gallows (1568, Hessiches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany).

After his return to Antwerp from Italy in 1555, Bruegel regularly made drawings for engravings published by the printing house owned by the graphic artist Hieronymus Cock. Some of Bruegel's drawings for Cock were landscapes, but others were clearly meant to capitalize on the popularity of the bizarre art of Bruegel's famous Flemish predecessor Hieronymus Bosch. The fantastic, monstrous figures and demonic dwarfs in Bruegel's series of engravings, The Seven Deadly Vices (1557) fall within this category. In the late 1550s, Bruegel began a series of large painted panels with complex compositions depicting various aspects of Flemish folk life. The earliest of these is an encyclopedic portrayal of common sayings, Netherlandish Proverbs (1559, Staatliche Museen, Berlin); they were followed by Combat Between Carnival and Lent (1559) and Children's Games (1560, both Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). All are marked by a perceptive observation of human nature, a pervasive wit, and the vitality of Bruegel's peasant figures. Later examples of folk subjects include Peasant Kermis and Peasant Wedding Feast (both 1566-c. 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

In 1565 Bruegel completed a group of paintings depicting landscapes and human activities through the seasons. Only five have survived and of these, The Return of the Hunters (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), is one of his best-known works.

Modern scholars are far from interpreting Bruegel's art as simple, whimsical folk subjects painted by an artist of mere peasant stock, as his biographer, the painter and art historian Karel van Mander, described him in 1604. Today he is seen as a knowledgeable man who was known to be a friend of such intellectuals as the geographer Abraham Ortelius.

Bruegel's pictures have been variously interpreted as referring to the beliefs of different religious thinkers, to the conflicts between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, to the political domination of the Lowlands by the Spanish, and as visual equivalents to dramatic allegories performed publicly by Flemish societies of rhetoric. He was widely known in his lifetime and his influence on later Netherlandish painting was immense.