Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Lore & Background

Bruegel's birth date is not documented but inferred from his entry into the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551, which usually occurred between ages twenty and twenty-five. His master was Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Early sources disagree on his birthplace: Lodovico Guicciardini recorded Breda, while Karel van Mander specified a village near Breda called 'Brueghel,' which does not fit any known place. Nothing is known of his family background. Scholars now emphasize that Bruegel was likely a townsman and highly educated, on friendly terms with humanists, though he apparently had not mastered Latin.

After training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to settle in Antwerp, working mainly as a prolific designer of prints for publisher Hieronymus Cock. At the end of the 1550s, he made painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the following period of little more than a decade before his early death in 1569. He married Mayken Coecke in 1563 and moved to Brussels, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He had two sons, both painters, and a daughter about whom nothing is known.

Reader's Guide

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was among the most significant artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting. He was a pioneer in presenting landscapes and peasant scenes as large paintings, and his innovative choices of subject matter were a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and later painting in general. He was one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting, and he painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Bruegel's works have inspired artists in both literary arts and cinema. His painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now thought only to survive in copies, is the subject of the final lines of W. H. Auden's 1938 poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts.' Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky refers to Bruegel's paintings in his films Solaris (1972) and Mirror (1975), and director Lars von Trier uses Bruegel's paintings in his film Melancholia (2011). Bruegel's work continues to be studied for its intellectual content and its reflection of the turbulent historical background of the Reformation and the Eighty Years' War.

Did You Know?

• Bruegel's birth date is not documented; it is inferred from his entry into the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551.
• He dropped the 'h' from his name in 1559, signing his paintings as Bruegel.
• Before his death, he told his wife to burn some drawings carrying inscriptions that were 'too sharp or sarcastic.'
• His painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is the subject of the final lines of W. H. Auden's poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts.'