Pieter Bruegel the Elder

• 1. Introduction

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  Pieter Bruegel the Elder was painting the world as most artists refused to see it: muddy, crowded, comic, and deeply human. In a time when painters filled their canvases with saints and noblemen, Bruegel planted himself at the edge of a village feast and watched the peasants eat. He was born sometime between 1525 and 1530, probably near Breda in the Low Countries, and he died in Brussels on the 9th of September 1569, probably in his early forties. That left him barely a decade to paint the works that would redefine what a large painting could be about.

  He painted no portraits, which was the other safe bet for a Netherlandish artist of his era. He painted peasants dancing, hunting in the snow, brawling over Carnival and Lent. He painted proverbs, children's games, and the seasons of the agricultural year at a scale that dwarfed anything that had come before. And tucked into those crowded, teeming canvases were harder things: allegories of greed, meditations on blindness, images that may have been dangerous enough that he asked his wife to burn some of them before he died.

  How did a man from an obscure Low Countries town become the most-copied painter of his generation? What drove him to subjects that his contemporaries largely ignored? And why do filmmakers, poets, and rock bands keep reaching back to his work five centuries later?

• 2. A World on Fire

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  Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517, roughly eight years before Bruegel was born, and the ripple effects never stopped. In the Low Countries where Bruegel grew up, the Reformation arrived alongside iconoclasm: the systematic destruction of religious art in churches. The Catholic Church, rattled by this assault, convened the Council of Trent, which concluded in 1563 and demanded that religious art pull itself back toward sacred subject matter and away from material decoration.

  Bruegel was among the first generation of artists to come of age after religious imagery had lost its status as the default subject for painting. That was not a liberation so much as a vacancy. The old framework was crumbling just as he was finding his feet. The Low Countries were also caught between Habsburg Spain's push for strict Catholic conformity, enforced by the Inquisition, and the growing Protestant populations across the Seventeen Provinces. Tensions that would eventually produce the Eighty Years' War were already building during the height of Bruegel's career. Two years before his death in 1569, that war began.

  In 1565, the same year Bruegel completed his celebrated series of the Months, Calvinist riots broke out across the region. Some historians have suggested he may have felt it prudent to accept a secular commission at that moment, avoiding the minefield of choosing sides in religious imagery. Whether that was calculation or coincidence, the months series stands as the great product of that turbulent year.

• 3. Training and the Road South

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  Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a painter based in Antwerp, was identified by the biographer Karel van Mander as Bruegel's master. Between 1545 and 1550, Bruegel trained under him. Coecke died on the 6th of December 1550, by which time Bruegel was already working in Mechelen, documented there between September 1550 and October 1551, helping another painter named Peeter Baltens on an altarpiece that has since been lost. He painted its wings in grisaille, the gray-toned technique used to mimic sculpture. That first documented work is already gone.

  In 1551, Bruegel was admitted as a free master to the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp. He then headed south to Italy, probably via France. By 1552, he had reached Reggio Calabria at the very tip of the Italian mainland, where he made a drawing of the city burning after a Turkish raid. He likely pushed on to Sicily. Back in Rome by 1553, he met the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whose will of 1578 recorded paintings by Bruegel, including at least one they made jointly. Those works have not survived.

  What he brought home from Italy was unexpected. Unlike most northern artists making the same trip, Bruegel appears to have paid little attention to classical ruins or contemporary Roman architecture. His surviving drawings from the journey are almost entirely landscapes. The mountain scenery of the Alps and southern Italy shaped the world landscape style he would make his own, though it took decades for scholars to sort out which Alpine drawings were actually his and which were later forgeries.

• 4. The Print Years

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  Hieronymus Cock ran a printing operation in Antwerp from a shop called the House of the Four Winds. He was, as one account puts it, the most important print publisher in northern Europe. From 1555, when Bruegel returned from Italy, until 1563, Bruegel lived in Antwerp and worked mainly as a designer for Cock's enterprise, producing drawings from which Cock's specialist engravers cut the plates. Bruegel himself worked the plates in only one case; the rest he left to craftsmen.

  Those prints reached a far wider audience than any painting could. For decades, Bruegel was better known through his graphic work than through his paintings, which is partly why critics for so long pigeonholed him as a maker of comic peasant scenes. The prints include allegory series modeled on the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, including The Seven Deadly Sins and The Virtues, as well as satires like The Ass in the School. Cock was not above exploiting the Bosch association: when Bruegel submitted a drawing called Big Fish Eat Little Fish, now in the Albertina museum, Cock published the print under Bosch's name because imitations of Bosch sold well.

  The print years also produced a cautionary tale about attribution. A celebrated series of large mountain landscape drawings was long thought to have been made by Bruegel on his Italian trip. In the 1980s, scholars established that the paper bore a lily watermark found only from around 1580 onward, more than a decade after Bruegel's death. Another group of about twenty-five pen drawings, many signed and dated as Bruegel's, turned out to include two drawings of Amsterdam dated 1563 that showed structures only built in the 1590s. Scholars now attribute that group to Jacob Savery and regard them as deliberate forgeries.

• 5. Painting the Peasant World

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  Netherlandish Proverbs, painted in 1559 and originally called The Blue Cloak, packs dozens of then-current aphorisms into a single scene. Many of those proverbs are still in use today in Flemish, French, English, and Dutch. That painting alone is an argument for what Bruegel was doing: constructing an encyclopedic record of popular culture at the moment it existed, in an expensive medium, at an imposing scale.

  His paintings of peasant life divide into two broad styles. The earlier works show dozens of small figures, seen from a high viewpoint, scattered across urban spaces or village settings, each group or individual absorbed in a separate activity, ignoring everyone else around them. Children's Games is an inventory of the amusements children played. The Peasant Wedding shows identifiable individuals at a specific celebration. The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, also from 1559, reads as a satire of the religious conflicts tearing the Low Countries apart, with the two sides rendered as allegorical figures stuffed with gluttony or austerity.

  By the 1560s, the approach shifted. Bruegel moved toward paintings with only a few large figures, placed in landscape settings without a distant panoramic view. The Blind Leading the Blind, painted in 1568, takes a passage from Matthew 15:14 and makes it literal: a chain of six blind men stumbling toward a ditch, each figure painted with a specific, medically observed type of eye damage. That precision is part of what modern scholars mean when they insist, against the old view, that Bruegel was a highly educated man moving in humanist intellectual circles rather than a peasant painter recording what he saw at local festivals.

• 6. The Months

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  In 1565, a wealthy Antwerp patron named Niclaes Jonghelinck commissioned Bruegel to paint one work for each month of the year. The resulting series are the peak of his landscape achievement. Each painting measures approximately three feet by five feet, making them far larger than the calendar illuminations they drew on, including the tradition established by manuscripts like the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry from 1416. The price of a commission in that period was calculated by size, so this was among the most significant commissions of Bruegel's career.

  Five of the paintings survive. The Hunters in the Snow covers December and January; The Gloomy Day covers February and March; The Return of the Herd covers October and November. All three are now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Hay Harvest, covering June and July, is in the Lobkowicz Palace in Prague. The Harvesters, covering July through August, hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting for April and May is assumed to be lost.

  Jonghelinck later defaulted on a tax debt. Archduke Ernst took possession of the series and had inventoried only six paintings as early as 1569, the year of Bruegel's death. By 1659, Archduke Leopold could account for only five. Joseph Koerner's 2018 book Bosch and Bruegel lays out the dispute among art historians over whether the series ever included six or twelve works. The winter landscapes from this series, particularly The Hunters in the Snow, have been cited as corroborating evidence of severe winters during the period known as the Little Ice Age. The most-copied single painting Bruegel ever made is the Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap from the same year, 1565; 127 copies are recorded, with the original in Brussels.

• 7. Family and Legacy

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  Bruegel married Mayken Coecke, the daughter of his former master Pieter Coecke van Aelst, in Brussels in 1563. Their marriage deposition was registered on the 25th of July 1563 in the archives of the Cathedral of Antwerp. Van Mander, always a source of biographical gossip, claimed that Bruegel's mother-in-law pushed for the Brussels move to distance him from an established servant girl mistress. Whether or not that is accurate, Bruegel spent the rest of his life in Brussels.

  He had two sons, both of whom became painters. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, born in 1564, copied his father's compositions with competence and considerable commercial success over a long career stretching to 1638. Jan Brueghel the Elder, born in 1568, was more original and versatile; he became an important figure in the shift to the Baroque style and collaborated frequently with Peter Paul Rubens, including on the Allegory of Sight. Their grandmother Mayken Verhulst trained both boys after Bruegel's death, since they were still very small children in 1569. Jan Brueghel's grandson Jan van Kessel the Elder extended the family's artistic reach further, and through David Teniers the Younger, who married into the family, the Brueghel lineage connects to both the Teniers and the Quellinus families of painters and sculptors.

  Before he died, Bruegel reportedly told his wife to burn certain drawings whose inscriptions were, in van Mander's words, too sharp or sarcastic, out of remorse or for fear that she might be held responsible for them. What those drawings contained, and what they said, has never been established. That small, irretrievable fire is one of the more haunting gaps in the history of Northern Renaissance art.

• 8. Echoes Across Five Centuries

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  W. H. Auden published his poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" in 1938, and its final lines turn on Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting now thought to survive only in copies. The poem's argument, that catastrophe happens while ordinary life continues indifferently around it, reads as a gloss on the most characteristic thing about Bruegel's compositions: suffering or miracle or disaster appears somewhere in the frame, while a ploughman keeps plowing and a ship sails on. William Carlos Williams wrote his own poem on the same painting in 1960, and his final collection alludes to several Bruegel works. Wisława Szymborska's 1957 poem "Brueghel's Two Monkeys" responds to a 1562 painting now in Berlin. Seamus Heaney, David Jones, Sylvia Plath, Don DeLillo, and Michael Frayn have all reached back to specific Bruegel paintings in their work.

  In cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky incorporated Bruegel's paintings into Solaris in 1972 and The Mirror in 1975. Lars von Trier used them in Melancholia in 2011, deliberately echoing Tarkovsky. Bruegel's 1564 painting The Procession to Calvary inspired a 2011 Polish-Swedish film, The Mill and the Cross, in which the painter is played by Rutger Hauer. The 2012 film Museum Hours is set partly in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where twelve of the roughly forty accepted surviving Bruegel paintings hang.

  In 2008, the debut album of Fleet Foxes, whose cover featured Bruegel's 1559 Netherlandish Proverbs, won the Best Art Vinyl Award, an annual prize run by Artvinyl.com. The vocalist Robin Pecknold said in an interview that he encountered the painting in a book and felt it was an appropriate allegory for the album's dense but unified sound. The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, which holds the original, told Pecknold they were pleased to see the work on a contemporary record. A small black mark on the history of authenticity: the London-based band Black Midi used a posthumously published 1570 Bruegel print, "The Battle About Money," for a 2019 single, underscoring how his graphic work keeps finding new audiences even outside the art world.