Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Peasants, Proverbs and Snow

Very little is known about Bruegel's life. He was born around 1525, probably near Breda, and according to a book on painters published in 1604, he trained with Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a leading Antwerp artist.¹

Because he signed and dated many works, we can follow his career picture by picture. Britannica calls him the greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century, renowned for his landscapes and his vigorous, often witty scenes of peasant life.¹

Around 1551–52 Bruegel traveled to Italy, as far as Sicily, and lived in Rome in 1553. Crossing the Alps left a deep mark: his drawings of high mountains are almost without parallel in European art.¹

Back in Antwerp, he designed prints for the publisher Hieronymus Cock, many of them satirical and moralizing, in the fantastic manner of Hieronymus Bosch, then very popular. Bruegel soon went beyond imitation.¹

In 1563 Bruegel married Mayken, his teacher's daughter, and moved to Brussels, where he painted his greatest pictures, most of them for collectors. One Antwerp collector, Niclaes Jonghelinck, owned 16 of his paintings by 1566.¹

The Met's Harvesters belonged to a six-part cycle of the seasons commissioned by an Antwerp merchant for the dining room of his country house. Workers cut wheat, gather apples and rest in the shade in the drowsy heat of July or August. The Met notes that it shows the peasants in a sympathetic but idealized light, downplaying the hardship of farm work to please a wealthy city patron.²

One of his patrons, the geographer Abraham Ortelius, called him in a memorable obituary the most perfect artist of the century. Through his sons Pieter and Jan, Bruegel founded a dynasty of painters that lasted into the 18th century.¹