18 facts about Pieter Bruegel

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 traveler in making both types of subject the focus in large paintings.

He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and difficult painting in general in his unprejudiced choices of subject matter, as one of the first generation of artists to grow up like religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject event of painting. He along with painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to see eye to eye in Antwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer of prints for the leading publisher of the day. Only towards the terminate of the decade did he switch to make painting his main medium, and all his well-known paintings come from the following period of Tiny more than a decade back his early death, when he was probably in his forward forties, and at the zenith of his powers.

As capably as looking forwards, his art reinvigorates medieval subjects such as choice drolleries of ordinary dynamism in illuminated manuscripts, and the calendar scenes of agricultural labours set in landscape backgrounds, and puts these on a much larger scale than before, and in the expensive medium of oil painting. He does the thesame with the astonishing and anarchic world developed in Renaissance prints and folder illustrations.

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