Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder
(1525?-1569), Flemish artist active in Antwerp and Brussels, famous for his
paintings and drawings of landscapes and scenes of robust peasant life, and
founder of a dynasty of artists that remained active well into the 17th
century.
Bruegel's art is often seen as the last phase in the
development of a long tradition of Netherlandish painting beginning with
Jan van Eyck in the 15th century. This tradition transformed the
abstraction of medieval art into a more empirical view of reality. Bruegel
clearly rejected the influences of Italian Renaissance art and its
classical foundations, which dominated the work of many of his Flemish
contemporaries. Rather than mythological subjects, muscular nudes, and idealized
scenes, Bruegel's art portrays figures observed from nature acting out realistic
situations in believable contemporary settings.
Bruegel is thought to have come from the town of Breda,
located in northern Brabant in present-day Holland. Born Pieter Brueghel, he
later dropped the “h” from his name. Before he became a member of the painters'
guild in Antwerp in 1551, he seems to have studied with Pieter Coecke in
Brussels and worked for a short time in Malines. After a trip to Italy between
1552 and 1555, Bruegel returned to Antwerp. In 1563 he married Coecke's
daughter, Maria Coecke van Aelst, and moved to Brussels, where he resided until
his death in September 1569. Their two children, Pieter the Younger and Jan,
both became painters of some renown.
Bruegel's earliest works were landscapes, an interest he
retained throughout his life. A number of panoramic landscape drawings made on
his Italian trip—for example, those preserved in Berlin (1552, Staatliche
Museen) and in London (1553, British Museum)—show Bruegel's ability, even in his
early career, to depict the changing seasonal moods and the atmospheric
qualities of nature. These same characteristics appear in his later landscape
paintings, such as Hunters in the Snow (1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna) and Magpie on the Gallows (1568, Hessiches Landesmuseum,
Darmstadt, Germany).
After his return to Antwerp from Italy in 1555, Bruegel
regularly made drawings for engravings published by the printing house owned by
the graphic artist Hieronymus Cock. Some of Bruegel's drawings for Cock were
landscapes, but others were clearly meant to capitalize on the popularity of the
bizarre art of Bruegel's famous Flemish predecessor Hieronymus
Bosch. The fantastic, monstrous figures and demonic dwarfs in Bruegel's
series of engravings The Seven Deadly Vices (1557) are within this
category. Late in the 1550s, Bruegel began a series of large painted panels with
complex compositions depicting various aspects of Flemish folk life. The
earliest of these is an encyclopedic portrayal of common sayings,
Netherlandish Proverbs (1559, Staatliche Museen), followed by Combat
Between Carnival and Lent (1559) and Children's Games (1560, both
Kunsthistorisches Museum). All are marked by a perceptive observation of human
nature, a pervasive wit, and the vitality of Bruegel's peasant figures. Later
examples of peasant folk subjects include Peasant Dance and Peasant
Wedding (both 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum).
Modern scholars are far from interpreting Bruegel's art as
simple, whimsical folk subjects painted by an artist from mere peasant stock, as
painter and art historian Karel van Mander described him in 1604. Recent writers
see him as a knowledgeable man who was known to be a friend of such
intellectuals as geographer Abraham Ortelius. Bruegel's pictures
have been variously interpreted as referring to the beliefs of different
religious thinkers, to the conflicts between Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism, to the political domination of the Lowlands by the Spanish, and
as visual equivalents to dramatic allegories performed publicly by Flemish
societies of rhetoric. |
