Pieter Bruegel d.ä.
The painter of peasants and the seasons.
Bruegel depicted peasant life, proverbs and landscapes in the Netherlands. His pictures teem with people working, feasting and fighting.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born around 1525–30. Where is uncertain, but it may have been near Breda. He became a master in the painters’ guild in Antwerp in 1551 and shortly afterwards made a long journey to Italy. What he brought home, however, was less the ideals of the Italian Renaissance than the memory of the vast landscapes of the Alps, which he drew during the journey.
Back in Antwerp he worked for the publisher Hieronymus Cock, making drawings that were turned into engravings. Several of them were in the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch, with moral subjects and fantastical monsters. His painting took off around 1559, when he painted Netherlandish Proverbs, now in Berlin, and The Fight between Carnival and Lent, now in Vienna. In 1563 he married Mayken Coecke, daughter of his probable teacher Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and moved to Brussels.
During the 1560s he painted his best-known works. The Tower of Babel and Children’s Games are both in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which has the world’s largest collection of his paintings. In 1565 he painted a series on the seasons of the year for a merchant in Antwerp. Five of them survive, among them The Hunters in the Snow, with its dark figures against a white winter landscape. Late works such as The Peasant Wedding and The Peasant Dance show folk life on a large scale.
Bruegel was a learned man who mixed with humanists, not a peasant. The story that he dressed up to attend peasant weddings comes from a biography written decades after his death. His pictures are full of humour and observation but also of seriousness. We often see the world from a high vantage point, where people become small in a large landscape. They work, feast and suffer, and in the background life goes on as usual.
Bruegel died in Brussels in 1569. His sons Pieter the Younger and Jan the Elder both became well-known painters. He is regarded as the first great painter of landscape and peasant life in the Netherlands.