Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525–1569) was a pioneering Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his detailed landscapes and peasant scenes. Early in his life, he was a student of the painter Pieter Kroke van Aelst, and in 1551, at about the age of 26, he was admitted to the painters' guild in Antwerp as a master painter. Bruegel settled fairly early in Antwerp, where he became a master in the painters’ Guild of Saint Luke between 1551 and 1552. After a trip to Italy, he began a long-standing association with Hieronymus Cock, whose Antwerp publishing house. Between 1555 and 1563, Bruegel made over forty designs for engravings, capitalizing on the strong market demand for images in the style or manner of Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450–1516).

Known as "Elder", to distinguish him from his elder son, also an artist, Pieter Bruegel was the greatest member of a large family of artists active for four generations. He was an inventive painter and draftsman. Bruegel translated moralizing subjects into the vernacular language in his original drawings and paintings, such as Netherlandish Proverbs which depicts over 100 proverbs in the familiar setting of a Flemish village. A number of Bruegel’s paintings focus on the lives of Flemish villages, which earned him the nickname “peasant Bruegel”. In religious or mythological depictions, such as the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Bruegel expanded the perspective to make the action a part of a broad scenery demonstrating the artist’s greatest innovation.

For the Antwerp home of the wealthy merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, Bruegel made a series of paintings representing the Seasons, of which five survive: Gloomy Day, Return of the Herd, Hunters in the Snow (all Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), Haymaking (Národní Galerie, Prague), and The Harvesters. These panoramic compositions represent a universal vision of the world.