Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) was probably born in or near Breda. He trained with the Antwerp painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst, became a master in the city's Guild of Saint Luke in 1551, and soon set off for Italy, reaching Rome and the far south of the peninsula. Back in Antwerp by 1555, he worked mainly as a designer of engravings for the publisher Hieronymus Cock. In 1563 he married Coecke's daughter Mayken and moved to Brussels, where he died in 1569. He was among the most significant painters of the Netherlandish Renaissance, and a pioneer in making landscapes and peasant life the subjects of large paintings. Almost all his best-known pictures date from his last decade, including the cycle of the months commissioned in 1565 by the Antwerp collector Niclaes Jonghelinck. His sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder both became painters, though he died too young to train them, and his choice of subjects shaped Dutch Golden Age painting. Six works here: Hunters in the Snow, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Blind Leading the Blind, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, The Procession to Calvary and The Tower of Babel.