Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Northern Renaissance Artist, Biography

Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Biography And Paintings Of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Northern Renaissance Dutch Artist.

Hunters in the Snow (detail) (1565)

Peter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the one of the Netherlands most famous Old Masters, best known for his detailed landscapes and colourful comical views of peasant life. Influenced by the Dutch Gothic painter Hieronymus Bosch, his most notable works include: The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels), the Peasant Wedding Feast, 1568 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

Little is known of Bruegel’s early life, but it is thought that he was born in Breda (located today on the Holland/Belgium border), around 1525. He studied as an apprentice under Flemish Northern Renaissance painter Pieter Coeck van Aelst, who was later also to become his father-in-law.

Winter Landscape With Bird Trap (1565)

In 1551 he was accepted as a Master at the Antwerp Painter’s Guild. He spent a few years in Italy, at the height of the Italian Mannerism movement, but despite this, remained close to Flemish traditions and worked to create his own original and complex style. Skilled at drawing and etching, his painting typically depicted solid peasants involved in everyday activities, painted with the use of bright pure pigment and compositions based on diagonal lines and S-curves which draws the viewers eye into the canvas.

In 1555 he first achieved some frame with a series of satirical engravings, when he went to work for a publisher’s house. As time progressed, he started to paint more realistic views of peasant life and biblical events, often viewed from above.

Massacre of the Innocents (1565-66).

The Procession to Calvary, 1564 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), The Tower of Babel, 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), The Adoration of Kings, 1564 (The National Gallery, London), and the Massacre of the Innocents, c.1566 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) were some of his greatest religious works. The Peasant Wedding Feast is one of his most famous ‘humane’ works, and demonstrates the artist’s droll sense of humour as well as his ability to make the even the most mundane events fascinating to view. He stressed the vulgar, the ugly and the absurd, but with a sympathetic, narrative eye. His works are best viewed in the original because being so detailed it is easy to miss some of their characters and unique facial expressions.

In 1563, Bruegel the Elder moved to Brussels where he remained until his death in 1569. It is during those highly productive years that his reputation as one of the great Dutch Northern Renaissance artists was founded. He influenced a generation of new artists, including his own sons, who became famous in their own right, Pieter Bruegel the Younger (1564–1637) and Jan Bruegel, the still-life artist (1568–1625). One of the most famous artists of Northern Europe, Pieter Brugel the Elder’s works can be viewed in collections around the world, including at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the National Gallery of London, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

...For a short biography of one of the greatest sculptors in the history of Western art, see Michelangelo.

• For information on art movements and styles, see: History of Art.
• For more about painting and sculpture in Ireland, see: Irish Art Guide