Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century and the first artist in the Western tradition to treat the peasant village — its weddings, its harvests, its festivals and its moral chaos — as a subject worthy of the full range of pictorial ambition. Bruegel was born probably in Brabant and trained as a painter in Antwerp, where he entered the Guild of St. Luke in 1551. He traveled to Italy in the early 1550s but was more influenced by the landscape he crossed in the Alps than by the art he saw in Rome; his mountains and his panoramic bird's-eye views of the Low Countries carry the memory of altitude throughout. He settled in Brussels around 1563. His subjects range from intimate proverb illustrations and peasant celebrations to apocalyptic scenes of extraordinary scope. The Hunters in the Snow (1565) is part of a series of paintings tracking the seasons that constitutes one of the most ambitious cycles of landscape painting before the 19th century. The Tower of Babel (1563) imagines the biblical construction site as a vast Flemish engineering project. The Peasant Wedding (c. 1567) and Peasant Dance (c. 1568) look at the low comedy and earthly appetite of rural life with a combination of gentle observation and Erasmian irony — the fool is visible in every crowd he paints, and the fool is usually us. Bruegel died in 1569, leaving two young sons — Pieter the Younger and Jan — who became significant painters by building careers largely on faithful copies and reworkings of their father's compositions. His originals, relatively few in number, are almost all now in major museum collections. The Habsburg emperors collected him aggressively; the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds the largest single group of paintings.