Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, 1838

Image here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_Hunters_in_the_Snow_(Winter)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Pieter Bruegel spent most of his career in Antwerp. Trained by the Flemish painter and designer Pieter Coeck, he fully embraced the Northern Renaissance’s love of portraying landscape and peasant life, and became perhaps its greatest practitioner. 

No matter what the nominal subject of his work, the landscape and the people he knew so well always feature, and often take centre stage. In this respect he is very much the harbinger of Dutch Golden Age painting of the following century. 

But Bruegel is also first and foremost a brilliant witness to his own time. His greatest works capture the tensions of a polity soon to be split asunder, in the violent uprising against Spanish rule which is now known as the Dutch Revolt. 

Clearly no fan of the Habsburgs, he nonetheless had to find ways to channel his feelings about Spanish misrule. The Massacre of the Innocents and The Census at Bethlehem provide the perfect vehicles for his anger at the treatment of his people. But Bruegel is also the joyful chronicler of the earthy exuberance of northern peasant life (The Peasant Wedding), as well as perhaps Europe’s first great fantasy artist (The Tower of Babel). 

His genius spawned what can only be described as a family business. He himself frequently made copies of his best pictures, but his sons, Pieter the Younger and Jan, would take this much further – copying and adapting (but never improving) for decades after his death.

Let’s meet this brilliant painter, and enjoy his keen eye, lust for life, and social conscience.

RJW F2627 Online (via Zoom)

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