Birth Year : 1525
Death Year : 1569
Country : Belgium
Pieter Brueghel (or Breugel), the great Flemish artist of the sixteenth
century, was born in Brueghel, near Breda. According to the Dutch historian
van Mander, he studied in Antwerp, first with the engraver Pieter Coecke
van Aelst, and then, in about 1550, with Hieronymous Cocke. By 1551, when
he set out on a long trip to Italy, he was an active, registered member
of the Antwerp Guild. During his Italian journey, Brueghel made many sketches
from nature and disregarded the antique monuments that so impressed other
northern artists. Upon his return to Antwerp in about 1555, Brueghel made
drawings for etchings by Cocke. He moved to Brussels in 1563, married and
began raising a family.
Brueghel had a successful life as a painter and a stimulating one as
a member of a distinguished group of humanists. His paintings of peasant
life, his landscapes, and his religious subjects are realistic and often
satiric. An optimist and a naturalist, he believed that peasant life was
rough, rather than vulgar, and saw it in relationship to the larger background
of nature. Brueghel's peasants are painted in a manner that emphasizes
their stolidity. He portrayed them in broad, flat areas of color, reminiscent
of Giotto, with very little modeling
or shadow, and with Giotto's structural
perspective and grandeur of composition. Although objective and open in
his approach to his genre scenes, Brueghel was by no means simple in his
proverbial and religious paintings, which are presented with a grandeur
of landscape that engenders an uneasy feeling of man's smallness and futility
in face of the universe. Brueghel died in 1569, while still a young man,
leaving behind two sons, Jan, called Velvet, and Pieter, the Younger, both
of whom became painters.
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Pieter
Brueghel the Elder
Peasants'
Dance
Pieter
Brueghel the Elder
Farmer's
Wedding
Pieter
Brueghel the Elder
Harvesters
Pieter
Brueghel the Elder
Winter,
Hunters in the Snow
Pieter
Brueghel the Elder
Children's
Games
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