Pieter Bruegel the Elder: life and works

Pieter Bruegel (also Brueghel or Breughel) the Elder (,also US: /ˈbruːɡəl/;Dutch: [ˈpitər ˈbrøːɣəl] (listen); c. 1525–1530 – 9 September 1569) was the most significant performer of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so-called genre painting); he was a trailblazer in making both types of subject the focus in large paintings.

He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and cutting edge painting in general in his protester choices of subject matter, as one of the first generation of artists to mount up up in the appearance of religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject event of painting. He as a consequence painted no portraits, the extra mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to reach agreement in Antwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer of prints for the leading publisher of the day. Only towards the grow less of the decade did he switch to make painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the in the heavens of period of Tiny more than a decade in the past his in front death, when he was probably in his in the future forties, and at the height of his powers.

As competently as looking forwards, his art reinvigorates medieval subjects such as substitute drolleries of ordinary vigor in illuminated manuscripts, and the manual scenes of agricultural labours set in landscape backgrounds, and puts these upon a much larger scale than before, and in the costly medium of oil painting. He does the same with the fantastic and anarchic world developed in Renaissance prints and autograph album illustrations.

He is sometimes referred to as “Peasant Bruegel”, to distinguish him from the many progressive painters in his family, including his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638). From 1559, he dropped the ‘h’ from his state and signed his paintings as Bruegel; his family continued to use “Brueghel” or “Breughel”.