Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Style and technique

Bruegel paints from a high vantage point, looking down. Almost all his great works are panoramic: a wide valley, a snowed-in village, a harbour, a hilltop with a windmill — and inside that landscape, hundreds of tiny human figures going about their lives. He invented a new kind of picture, somewhere between a moralising religious allegory and what would later be called a landscape.

His people are not heroes. They are peasants, farmers, beggars, dancers, children, drunkards, hunters, the blind, the dead. He painted them with a clear-eyed sympathy — never sentimental, never quite mocking — that no other 16th-century painter attempted. Most Renaissance painting was about gods, saints, kings and biblical heroes. Bruegel painted the people who actually lived in his country.

Four fingerprints make a Bruegel unmistakable.

The high horizon. The viewer always stands as if on a hilltop, looking down. The figures are small, the landscape is large. This perspective lets him pack dozens of scenes into a single panel.

Tiny figures with specific actions. Each peasant is doing something — winnowing grain, slipping on ice, pulling a loaded sled, hanging a man, drinking, throwing up after a wedding feast. He treated everyday gestures as the subject of art.

Cool, narrow palette. Bruegel's late great panels are dominated by brown earth, grey-green water, white snow, slate sky. Bright colour is rare and stands out — a single red coat in a field of grey, a yellow scarf in a winter scene.

Hidden religious subject. Several of his apparently secular landscapes are actually religious paintings in disguise. 'The Procession to Calvary' (1564) is a Flemish landscape with a hundred peasants — and Christ, the supposed centre of the picture, is a tiny figure barely visible in the middle distance.

Bruegel learned a lot from Hieronymus Bosch, who had died about ten years before he was born. His earliest engravings reuse Bosch's apocalyptic monsters and his crowded surfaces. He printed and sold them deliberately as 'Bosch' (the marketing of the day) before slowly developing his own much calmer, more humane manner.

Life and legacy

Almost nothing is known with certainty about Bruegel's early life. He was born around 1525, possibly in or near the village of Breugel in the Duchy of Brabant (now in the Netherlands), or in the small town of Breda — sources from the time give different versions. His given name was probably Pieter, but the family name varies wildly across documents (Bruegel, Brueghel, Breughel, Brueghels). He is the founder of an entire dynasty of painters: his sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder would both have major careers, and the family painted, in slightly varying styles, for the next century and a half.

He was apprenticed in Antwerp under the Flemish painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayken he would much later marry. By 1551 he was registered as a master of the Antwerp painters' guild. Within a year he set out on a long trip to Italy — through France, across the Alps, down to Naples and possibly Sicily.

He came back with sketchbooks full of mountain and sea drawings. The Italian Renaissance buildings, statues and figures barely registered with him; the Alps had hit him like a religion. The mountain scenes in his later panels — distant snow-capped ranges in 'Hunters in the Snow', enormous foreshortened cliffs in the 'Tower of Babel' — all draw on those drawings. Bruegel is the first major painter to make the Alps a subject in their own right.

Back in Antwerp he worked first as a print designer for the publisher Hieronymus Cock, producing engravings full of Bosch-like monsters that sold all across northern Europe. The publisher even put 'Bosch' on some of them to boost sales.

In 1563 he married Mayken Coecke and moved to Brussels. Vasari, writing in Italy, never mentions him — Bruegel was not a Roman or Florentine, did not paint religious altarpieces in the conventional Italian sense, and was almost unknown in the Mediterranean. But in the Spanish Netherlands he was famous and prosperous. His patrons were rich Antwerp merchants and a Habsburg cardinal.

Between 1564 and 1569 he produced the panels he is now most famous for: 'The Tower of Babel' (1563), 'The Procession to Calvary' (1564), the so-called Months series of 1565 (six enormous panels, of which five survive — 'Hunters in the Snow', 'The Gloomy Day', 'The Return of the Herd', 'The Harvesters', 'The Hay Harvest'), 'The Wedding Banquet' and 'The Peasant Dance' (around 1568), and finally 'The Magpie on the Gallows' (1568, his own personal painting, kept by his wife after his death).

The political situation in the Netherlands in those years was catastrophic. The Catholic Spanish ruler Philip II had sent the Duke of Alba to suppress Protestant unrest; thousands of Flemings were executed or exiled. Bruegel painted during the Spanish Fury of 1568, with public hangings, burnings, and confiscations going on around him. Several of his late paintings — 'The Numbering at Bethlehem', 'The Massacre of the Innocents' — recast biblical violence as Spanish soldiers in Flemish villages, and several of them were censored or had figures painted out by later owners afraid of getting in trouble.

He died at Brussels on 9 September 1569, aged about 44, of a sudden illness whose nature is not recorded. He was buried in the church of Notre Dame de la Chapelle, where his tomb can still be seen. His son Jan was less than a year old; Pieter the Younger was about four. Both grew up to become painters, both copied their father obsessively for the rest of their careers.

The Bruegel collection of the Habsburg dukes — most of his great panels — eventually ended up in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where 12 of his roughly 40 surviving paintings hang in a single room. It is the largest gathering of his work in the world.

Five famous paintings

Hunters in the Snow 1565

The most famous painting in the so-called Months series, commissioned in 1565 by the wealthy Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jonghelinck as a cycle of six panels for the dining room of his country house. Three exhausted hunters return home with their dogs across a snowed-in hilltop, having clearly had a bad day — only one small fox dangles from one of their spears. Below them, the village stretches out: women lighting a fire to singe a pig, peasants skating on frozen ponds, geese, crows, smoke rising from chimneys, a windmill on the far ridge. The Alps loom behind, recalled from Bruegel's Italian journey twelve years earlier. The painting is roughly 117 × 162 cm, painted in oil on oak panel, and hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The Tower of Babel 1563

The first of two versions Bruegel painted of the same subject — both adapted from Genesis 11, in which humanity tries to build a tower to heaven and is punished with confusion of languages. The larger Vienna version (1563) is enormous (114 × 155 cm) and shows the half-finished tower spiralling up out of a Flemish harbour, with hundreds of tiny construction workers at every level, masons cutting blocks, cranes hauling, ships unloading marble at the docks. King Nimrod, the legendary builder of the tower, stands at the lower left inspecting the work. The architecture echoes the Roman Colosseum (Bruegel had drawn it in Italy) and the cracks already starting to show in the lower courses suggest the whole project will collapse. The painting is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; a smaller second version is in Rotterdam.

The Triumph of Death 1562

Painted around 1562, an apocalyptic landscape on a single oil panel about 117 × 162 cm. Death — represented as a vast army of skeletons — has descended on the world. They massacre kings and peasants, cardinals and bandits, lovers caught at table. Coffins on wheels roll over villages, fires burn on every horizon, a giant cooking pot bubbles in the centre, a ship sinks in the bay on the right. The painting is, on one level, a moralising medieval *memento mori* — death respects no class, no profession, no piety. On another level it is a coded response to the religious wars and Spanish repressions then beginning to engulf the Netherlands. It hangs in the Prado, Madrid, where it has been since the 17th century.

The Peasant Wedding 1568

Painted around 1568. A long table of peasants celebrates a country wedding inside a barn. The bride sits at centre, hands folded calmly, against a dark cloth canopy on which a paper crown hangs. Two servers carry a long wooden door used as a tray, loaded with bowls of porridge. A bagpiper plays at the right. A small child, sitting on the floor in the foreground in an oversized red hat, licks his fingers. Bruegel's peasants are not idealised — they are squat, broad, ruddy-cheeked, busy eating — but they are also not mocked. The painting is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and is roughly 114 × 164 cm.

The Harvesters 1565

Another panel from the Months series of 1565, depicting late summer in a Flemish wheat field. The painting shows roughly thirty peasants at work — some still scything, some drinking water from a leather flask, a group of seven taking lunch under a pear tree, one man fast asleep on his back, mouth open, exhausted. The horizon is high; the wheat fields stretch off into a blue distance with a small bay and ships in the far background. The painting is one of the earliest in Western art to take a working farm landscape as its only subject. It is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has been since 1919.