Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
scene by scene

1. 1551Antwerp

   Nobody recorded exactly when or where Pieter Bruegel was born. He steps into history in 1551, when his name was entered in the register of the Antwerp painters' guild as a master. That meant he could now sign his own work and take on pupils. Antwerp was then a booming port, full of ships, bankers, and buyers for pictures.

2. 1553Rome

   Almost as soon as he became a master, he headed south. By 1553 he was in Rome, working alongside the celebrated miniature painter Giulio Clovio, whose later inventory listed works by Bruegel. On the way back he crossed the Alps. Those peaks and deep valleys would keep turning up in his landscapes for the rest of his life.

3. 1556Antwerp

   Back in Antwerp, he drew designs for Hieronymus Cock, a print publisher whose shop was called At the Four Winds. In 1556 Bruegel drew Big Fish Eat Little Fish. When the print came out the next year, the plate named not Bruegel but Hieronymus Bosch, the older painter whose name sold well. A young artist's picture went to market under a famous label.

4. 1559Antwerp

   Around this year he dropped the h from his signature and began to write BRVEGEL. He also painted Netherlandish Proverbs, which packs dozens of sayings into one village, and a crowded town square where Carnival and Lent fight it out. The painter-biographer Karel van Mander later wrote that Bruegel and his friend Hans Franckert dressed as peasants to slip into country weddings and fairs and watch people up close.

5. 1563Brussels

   In 1563 Bruegel married Mayken Coecke in the church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle in Brussels. According to Van Mander, she was the daughter of his old teacher, Pieter Coecke van Aelst. The couple made their home in Brussels. That same year he painted The Tower of Babel, a vast spiral of stone still under construction.

6. 1565Brussels

   Niclaes Jongelinck, a wealthy Antwerp merchant, ordered a set of paintings for his house, showing the year in its seasons. Five of them survive, and The Harvesters is the one for late summer. Find the man asleep against the tree trunk, shirt open, mouth wide. Next to him his companions bite into bread and empty their bowls. On the left another man walks out of a narrow path cut through wheat as tall as he is, a jug in each hand.

   Painted around this timeThe Harvesters
7. 1569Brussels

   Bruegel died in Brussels in 1569 and was buried in the same church where he had married. His sons, Pieter and Jan, were still small children. They never had the chance to learn from their father, yet both grew up to be painters, and Brueghel became the name of a family of artists for generations.