Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born around 1525, possibly in the region of Breda, though the details are uncertain. In 1551 he joined the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke and then traveled to Italy; the many mountain drawings he made crossing the Alps laid the foundation for his later landscapes. Back in Antwerp he designed prints for the publisher Hieronymus Cock, many of them in the fantastic manner of Hieronymus Bosch. In 1563 he married the daughter of his teacher Pieter Coecke van Aelst and moved to Brussels, where he produced a series of masterpieces. He painted peasants at work and at festivals, proverbs and biblical stories, crowded with lively, earthy figures and often seen from a high viewpoint over vast landscapes that set human life within the rhythms of nature. The Tower of Babel and The Hunters in the Snow date from these years. The Harvesters belongs to a series of paintings of the seasons made in 1565 for the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, of which five survive: peasants cut the golden wheat while others eat and rest beneath a tree, and the landscape stretches away to the horizon. Bruegel died in Brussels in 1569. His sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder, both became celebrated painters.