Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born sometime between 1525 and 1530, most likely near Breda in the Low Countries. He died in Brussels on the 9th of September 1569, probably in his early forties.
Bruegel is known for large-scale genre paintings depicting peasant life, including village festivals, seasonal labor, and proverbs, as well as landscape paintings and religious scenes set in broad Flemish landscapes. He was a pioneer in treating these subjects as the main focus of large oil paintings rather than as background details.
Niclaes Jonghelinck, a wealthy Antwerp patron, commissioned the Months series in 1565. Five of the paintings survive: The Hunters in the Snow, The Gloomy Day, The Return of the Herd, The Hay Harvest, and The Harvesters. The painting for April-May is assumed to be lost.
Auden's 1938 poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" concludes with lines about Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting now believed to survive only in copies. The poem focuses on how the world continues indifferently while disaster unfolds in a corner of the frame.
Bruegel had two sons who became prominent painters: Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638), who successfully copied and adapted his father's compositions, and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), who was more original and collaborated with Peter Paul Rubens on multiple works. Both boys were trained by their grandmother Mayken Verhulst after Bruegel died while they were still small children.
The most-copied painting by Bruegel is the Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, painted in 1565, with 127 recorded copies. The original hangs in Brussels at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.