1000 Museums

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569) is one of the most renowned names of the Northern Renaissance. Born in Breda in the Netherlands, he moved to Antwerp at a young age, where he lived most of his life. Antwerp was the center of printing and publishing in Northern Europe and was a major center of trade; many of his patrons included the city’s wealthy merchants. Bruegel’s family owned a successful printmaking business. Although many of his works focus on the lives of villages and peasants, Bruegel associated with some of the most elite humanists and publishers of the time. Bruegel worked primarily in painting and engravings and most often depicted complex landscape scenes that showed everyday peasant life. Around 1551, he became the master of the painters’ Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp and later worked at the Four Winds publishing house, making engravings of landscapes and parable scenes. Hieronymous Bosch’s (1450-1516) paintings featuring panoramic landscapes, crowds of interacting figures, and multiple narratives that require close looking were in vogue at the time, and Bruegel spent much of his career making print engravings in the style of Bosch for the art market of Antwerp. While the influence of Bosch is evident in the engravings and paintings of Pieter Bruegel, Bruegel’s work focused primarily on scenes of village life through genre paintings or seasonal cycles. He depicted parables of proverbs, scenes from peasant life, including festivals and ceremonies, or even simply seasonal chores, all of which added a humanizing perception to his genre paintings. In addition to the intimate narratives of peasant labor, Bruegel’s landscapes demonstrate strong use of color and atmosphere. Although he lived in the Netherlands, where the landscape is very flat, he was inspired by his travels abroad to include mountain peaks and valleys in his paintings. He died around the age of forty on September 9, 1569, in Brussels, Belgium.