Background
Pieter the Elder was born approximately in 1525 in Breda, Duchy of Brabant, Habsburg Netherlands (present-day Breda, North Brabant, Netherlands).
Pieter the Elder was born approximately in 1525 in Breda, Duchy of Brabant, Habsburg Netherlands (present-day Breda, North Brabant, Netherlands).
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a pupil of Pieter Coecke during the period from 1545 to 1550. He also was associated with the publisher Hieronymus Cock, who engraved many of Brueghel's drawings.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder traveled to Italy during 1552 and 1553, journeying as far as Sicily. On his return in 1554, he explored the Alps. He then lived for some time in Antwerp and settled finally in Brussels in 1563. Here, he married and prospered, enjoying both the admiration of his contemporaries and more than sufficient commissions from influential patrons.
Bruegel's earliest works are landscape sketches, some of which are keenly perceptive observations of nature and others routine explorations of the landscape formulae, used by the Venetians and also evident in the canvases of older northerners, such as Joachim Patinir (about 1485-1524) and Herri Met de Bles (about 1480-1550). This interplay of direct observation with arbitrary formula creates the compelling effect of Brueghel's paintings. He saw landscape not simply as scenery, but as the arena for the unfolding of the human drama.
The painter enriched the imagery of folly, reviving the monstrous and fantastic creatures of Hieronymus Bosch (about 1450-1516). These creatures appear in a series of engravings of the "Seven Deadly Sins" and the "Seven Cardinal Virtues".
In many of Bruegel's paintings the figures, although colorfully detailed and costumed, have anonymous, masklike faces. The painter was never interested in the individual. Rather, he concerned himself with Everyman of the medieval mystery plays, and it was that anonymous man, who populated the cosmic setting of the artist's great religious paintings.
Perhaps Bruegel's most majestic pictures are the five landscapes, called "Seasons or Months", showing the Flemish countryside at different times of the year. Few painters have so sensitively captured the moods of the seasons or suggested man's intimate relation to the rhythms of nature.
As in the beginning, so at the end, Pieter mused upon man's inherent folly. A painting, inscribed "I sorrow because the World cannot be trusted", shows a leering dwarf, stealing the purse of a misanthropic old man. In another, "The Blind Leading the Blind", six blind men, in single file, stagger toward a creek, into which the first of them has already ignominiously fallen. The painting marks the words of the parable (Matthew 15:14), "And if the blind shall lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch."
In 1556, Bruegel entered the house of the Antwerp publisher, Hieronymus Cock, as a designer for engravings. His pen drawing of that year, entitled "Big Fish Eat Little Fish", was published in 1557 as an engraving by Cock, who substituted Bosch's name for Bruegel's in order to exploit the fashion for Bosch's works then current at Antwerp. The series "Seven Deadly Sins", engraved in 1558, however, carries the artist's own signature, a sign of Bruegel's increasing importance. In these works, Bruegel, unlike any of his Antwerp contemporaries, achieved a truly creative synthesis of Bosch's demonic symbolism with his own personal vision of human folly and depravity. Despite efforts to dismiss these engravings as "fascinating drolleries", there is evidence to suggest, that Bruegel was attempting to substitute a new and more relevant eschatology for Bosch's traditional view of the Christian cosmos.
Bruegel was commissioned to execute a series of pictures of the months for Niclaes Jonghelinck of Antwerp in 1565. Based upon the medieval idea of the labors of the seasons as seen, for example, in cathedral sculpture or the illuminations of late Gothic books of hours, Bruegel's series represents a magnificient culmination of this tradition. Of the original group, five paintings have survived.
Through the striking beauty and originality of his seasonal pictures Bruegel enunciated a new coherency in man's relationship to the natural scheme. Casting off the established order and hierarchy of the medieval and Renaissance cosmologies, he substituted a view of a dynamically evolving world, that is fundamentally modern in its conception.
Landscape with a Fortified Town
Netherlandish Proverbs
Pride
Man of War Between Two Galleys
Land of Cockaigne
The Return of the Herd (November)
Armed Three Master with Daedalus and Icarus in the Sky
Charity
The Wine of Saint Martin's Day
The Procession to Calvary
Envy
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Sermon of St. John the Baptist
The Massacre of the Innocents
Landscape with the Flight into Egypt
Three Soldiers
Crafty Bird Catcher
The Gloomy Day (January)
Children's Games
Jerome in the Desert
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
Ice Skating Before the Gate of Saint George, Antwerp
Rustic Market
Lust
The Magpie on the Gallows
The Triumph of Death
Parable of the Blind
Last Judgment
The Ass in the School
Peasant Wedding
The Suicide of Saul
The Same God So That He Obtained of the Magus Was by Demons Be Pulled in Pieces
The Drunkard Pushed Into the Pigsty
The Harvesters (July-August)
Philistine
The Fat Kitchen
The Peasant Dance
Hope
Market for the country
Twelve Proverbs
James the Late Emperor of the Devil is Stopped the Illusions of a Magician
The Hare Hunt
Greed
Anger Makes the Mouth Swell and Blackens the Blood in the Veins
Hunters in the Snow
Misanthrope
Faith
Two Monkeys
Prudence
Mountain Landscape with a River
Go Ye Into the Emmaus
Conversion of St. Paul
Big Fishes Eat Small Fishes
Courage
The Fair at Hoboken
Running Away the Mother of God into Egypt
Justice
The Storm at Sea
Naval Battle in the Gulf of Naples
Census at Bethlehem
Yawning Man (Disputed Attribution)
Laziness
The Resurrection of Christ
The Death of the Virgin
The Fair of Saint George's Day
The Cart, the Belgic
Landscape of the Alps
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
The Penitent Magdalene
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
Portrait of an Old Woman
Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap
The Wedding Dance in the Open Air
Wooded Region
Walls Towers and Gates of Amsterdam
Dulle Griet (Mad Meg)
The Adoration of the Kings
The Beggars
The Adoration of the Kings
River Landscape with a Sower
View of Tivoli
Summer
The Alchemist
The "Little" Tower of Babel
Soldiers at Rest
The Tower of Babel
Haymaking (June and July)
Alpine Landscape
The Beekeepers and the Birdnester
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent
Landscape with Christ Appearing to the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias
The Peasant and the Birdnester
Seascape with a View of Antwerp
The Adoration of the Kings in the Snow
Some have seen Pieter Bruegel as an Orthodox Catholic, others as the adherent of a heretical sect.
Quotations: "Because the world is so faithless, I go my way in mourning."
Bruegel became a free master in the Guild of Saint Luke of Antwerp in 1551.
Bruegel was many men at once: a medieval moralist and a modern landscapist. A sympathizer with peasant life and a sophisticated urban intellect. An indigenous northern artist, yet a man, influenced by Italian painting.
Bruegel married Mayken Coecke in 1563. Pieter Bruegel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder were Pieter's sons.