Virtual Gallery

            Pieter Bruegel the Elder, nicknamed 'Peasant Bruegel' was probably the most significant and exciting painter in the Northern Europe during the middle part of the sixteenth century. His nickname "Peasant Bruegel" indicates to his subjects: peasant life, proverbs and genre scenes, the New Testament topics set among common folks of contemporary Flanders.
            The date and place of Bruegel's birth are uncertain, most of the scholars consider he was born near Breda in the period between 1525- 1530. Until 1559 he spelt his name 'Brueghel', then as 'Bruegel', the reason for this change is unknown and his sons retained 'h' in their names.
            Very probably the young Bruegel was apprenticed to Pieter Coeck van Aelst (1502-1550), a leading Antwerp artist, sculptor, architect, and designer of tapestry and stained glass, whose daughter Bruegel would later marry. In 1551 Bruegel became a Master of the Antwerp Guild. In 1552, 1553 and possibly for part of 1554 he traveled abroad. In 1552 he was in the south of Italy, visiting Reggio Calabria, Messina, Palermo and Naples, and in the following year he was in Rome, where he came into contact with a well-known painter and miniaturist of the time, Giulio Clovio, who created a small-scale picture of the Tower of Babel on ivory, and a View of Lyons (France). Both works are now lost. On his return journey to the Netherlands, Bruegel evidently spent some time in Switzerland, where he made many drawings of the Alps.
            Back in Antwerp (late 1554-1555) Pieter Bruegel started working for Hieronymus Cock (1510-1570), the Antwerp engraver and publisher of prints. His Alpine sketches formed the basis of a number of elaborate landscape designs (dated from 1555 onwards), which were actually engraved by other artists. Cock was apparently pleased with Bruegel's work for he was soon employing him on figure compositions as well. Of these, the serious of The Seven Deadly Sins (1556-7) and the famous Big Fish Eat Little Fish (engraved by Van der Heyden in 1557) are typical early examples. For the rest of his life Bruegel was active as both a painter and designer of prints, and the two activities were closely linked.
            In 1563 Bruegel married Mayken, the daughter of Pieter Coeck and Mayken Verhulst Bessemers. His mother-in-law was also a painter, engaged in miniatures. Later, after the death of her son-in-law, she would give the first lessons in painting to his sons, Pieter and Jan. The couple settled in Brussels. In 1564 their first son, future painter Pieter Bruegel the Younger (d. 1638) was born. At that time Bruegel acquired a patron and friend, Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a wealthy Antwerp merchant, who would eventually made a collection of 16 Bruegel's works. Thus he commissioned a series of the Months, unfortunately only 5 of 12 paintings survived, The Hunters in the Snow (January), The Gloomy Day (February), Haymaking (July), The Corn Harvest (August), The Return of the Herd (November).
            In 1568 his second son, Jan, also a future painter, Jan Bruegel the Elder, 'Velvet' Bruegel (d.1625) was born.
During the last six years of his life Bruegel was much influenced by Italian Renaissance art, whose monumentality of form he found increasingly sympathetic. This influence is evident in The Peasant Wedding, The Peasant Dance and The Peasant and the Birdnester: the figures are now larger in scale and closer to the spectator, the viewpoint is lower and there is less concern with the setting. In spite of these radical developments, however, Bruegel continued to produce paintings in his old style, with tiny figures in a panoramic space.
            In September 1569 Bruegel died, and was buried in Notre Dame de la Chapelle, Brussels; in 1578 died Mayken Bruegel, the orphaned children were brought up by their grandmother.

            The surviving pictures of Bruegel are few in number - under fifty.
"Although Bruegel was famous in his own lifetime, the archaic tone of much of his imagery and his refusal to adopt the idealized figure style evolved by Italian Renaissance artists had, in sophisticated circles, an adverse effect on his reputation both during his life and after his death" (Keith Roberts). Bruegel's works did not agree with current aesthetic theories of his time, but they wonderfully match to the tastes of our contemporaries.
 

Landscape with Christ Appearing to the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias is Bruegel's earliest known painting.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The literary source is the myth about the great Greek engineer Daedalus, who, as a slave, worked for King Minos at Crete, and among other things constructed the famous Labyrinth for him. His most passionate desire was to get freedom, he constructed wings for his son, Icarus, and himself to fly away from Crete. Icarus ignored his father's warning not to fly high; there the sun melted the wax, which fastened the feathers of the wings, and Icarus fell into the sea. Only the legs of Icarus could be seen in the right bottom corner of the painting. The painting also refers to the Flemish proverb 'No plough stops because a man dies'.

The Fight between Carnival and Lent. This painting takes as its subject the traditional annual carnival, which was held in Flanders in the week before lent. A half-religious, half-secular festival, it provided an excuse for excesses of drinking and sex: contemporary moralists condemned it as the devil's week.

The Flemish Proverbs is an allegorical painting with the whole world of proverbs; among the others, Bruegel illustrates the following: "He blocks up the well after the calf is drowned"; "One shears the sheep, another the pig"; "One holds the distaff, which the other spins"; "The pig has been stuck though the belly"; "He throws roses to the swine"; "He brings baskets of light into the daylight".

Children's Games. Children absorbed with their games and toys, as seriously as adults in their 'grown-up' businesses, is perhaps an allegory of the moral that adults are still children in the sight of God.

'Dulle Griet' (Mad Meg). Griet was a disapproving name given to any bad-tempered, shrewish woman, about which there are many Flemish  proverbs: 'She could plunder in front of hell and return unscathed', 'One woman makes a din, two women a lot of trouble, three an annual market, four a quarrel, five an army, and against six the Devil himself has no weapon'. Bruegel's Griet and her companions are preparing to storm the mouth of Hell itself. The painter is thus making fun of noising, aggressive women.

The Land of Cockaigne. In Dutch the Land of Cockaigne is Luikkerland, the land of lazy and gluttonous:
All you loafers and gluttons always lying about
Farmer, soldier and clerk, you live without work.
Here the fences are sausages, the houses are cake,
And the fowl fly roasted, ready to eat.

The Peasant and the Birdnester is thought to illustrate a Flemish proverb: "He who knows where the nest is, has the knowledge; he who robs it, has the nest". The painting presents a moralizing contrast between the active, wicked individual and the passive man who is virtuous in spite of adversity. It has been suggested that, with his knowledge of Italian art, Bruegel intended the peasant's gesture as a profane parody of the gesture of Leonardo's St. John the Baptist.

The Parable of the Blind. In this tragic image Bruegel gives visual expression to Christ's words about people's inner blindness to true religion: "they are blind guides, and if one blind man guides another they will both fall into the ditch." (Matthew 15:14).

The Magpie on the Gallows is also an allegorical painting. Keith Roberts considers that "it refers to the transience of pleasure, and the threat of extinction which hangs over all mortals. The gallows are a memento mori, which throws a long shadow over the gaiety of the peasants' dance and the beauty of the sunlit landscape'.

The Misanthrope. The hooded misanthrope, who refuses to look at the world, is being robbed by the small figure in a glass ball, a symbol of vanity. The inscription on the painting reads: 'because the world is perfidious, I am going into mourning'. The moral of the painting is that this belief brings only harm and first of all to its owner. It's immoral to live in the world and abandon responsibility for it.

Bibliography:

Pieter Bruegel the Elder. by S. Lvov. Moscow. 1971.
Bruegel. by N. Gershenzon-Tchegodayeva. Moscow. 1983.
Painting of Europe. XIII-XX centuries. Encyclopedic Dictionary. Moscow. Iskusstvo. 1999.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Prints and Drawings. by Nadine M. Orenstein (Editor), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pieter Bruegel. Yale Univ Pr, 2001.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna by Pieter Bruegel (Editor), Wilfried Seipel (Editor), Kunsthistorisches museu. Skira, 1999.
Pieter Bruegel: The Elder (Masters of Art Series) by Wolfgang Stechow, Pieter Bruegel. Harry N Abrams, 1990