Art

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

c. 1525–1569 · Flemish (Brabant, Habsburg Netherlands)

Northern Renaissance

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was the greatest Netherlandish painter of the sixteenth century, working in Antwerp and later Brussels. He turned landscape and scenes of peasant life into serious art, crowding his panels with detailed, often moralising observations of ordinary people. He founded a painting dynasty through his sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

How to spot them

▸Panoramic, high-viewpoint landscapes crowded with tiny, busy figures seen from above
▸Stocky, round-faced peasants at work, dancing, feasting or playing — hence the nickname "Peasant Bruegel"
▸Encyclopedic 'teeming' panels illustrating proverbs, games or allegories (e.g. dozens of idioms acted out literally)
▸Quiz clue pattern: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the seasons, Icarus, Babel, or "father of the Brueghel dynasty"

Key works

The Hunters in the Snow (1565)

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Weary hunters and dogs look down on a frozen valley of skaters; one of his series of the months or seasons

Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Netherlandish Proverbs (1559)

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

A village acting out around 100 Dutch proverbs literally; also called The Blue Cloak

Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

The Tower of Babel (1563)

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The 'Great' Tower, modelled on the Roman Colosseum; a smaller 'Little' Tower of Babel is in Rotterdam

Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

The Peasant Wedding (1567)

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Barn wedding feast with pies carried on a door taken off its hinges; the bride sits beneath a paper crown

Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

The Triumph of Death (c. 1562)

Museo del Prado, Madrid

Apocalyptic panorama of skeleton armies slaughtering the living, influenced by Hieronymus Bosch

Image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560)

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

A ploughman ignores Icarus' legs splashing into the sea; now usually thought an early copy of a lost Bruegel

Image: After Pieter Brueghel the Elder · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Quick-fire facts

•Nicknamed "Peasant Bruegel" for his scenes of rural life; he reportedly disguised himself to attend peasant weddings.
•He was the father of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder ("Velvet Brueghel"); the sons kept the 'h' he dropped.
•The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds the world's largest collection of his paintings, including Hunters in the Snow, Tower of Babel, Peasant Wedding and Children's Games.
•The Hunters in the Snow belongs to a series of seasonal paintings made in 1565 for the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck; five survive.
•W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938) is inspired by Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
•He travelled to Italy in the early 1550s, but his Alpine sketches mattered more to his art than Italian classicism.
•He was influenced by Hieronymus Bosch, and early prints after his designs were even marketed as Bosch-like.

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Sources

Encyclopaedia Britannica — Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna — Bruegel collection
E. H. Gombrich — The Story of Art