Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525 - 1569) Less than four dozen paintings and about a hundred drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder have survived the four and a half centuries (almost) that separate us from the painter’s death. Nearly all of them are now considered masterpieces. Very little is know about the artist’s early life, there is no certainty either about the place and the time of birth, but he was probably born near Breda, sometime after 1525. The reasons that lead him to changing his name from Brueghel to Bruegel are also not known. His sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel The Elder reverted to the older version of the name. There were several other Bruegels who became well known in the art world, but none has quite reached the fame of the founder of this remarkable dynasty of the Flemish painters. The two sons of Bruegel, Peiter and Jan, incidentally, were brought up after their parent’s relatively early deaths by their grandmother, who was also a painter. Bruegel seems to have studied in Antwerp (now in Belgium) under Coecke van Aelst, and had spent several years in Italy in the early 1550s. Eventually he settled in Brussels, where he died on September 5, 1569. We can probably learn more from Bruegel’s paintings about the lives of ordinary people in the 16th century Holland, of their customs, traditions, proverbs, joys and fears, etc., than from any other source. Bruegel’s paintings are usually highly symbolical, and they are often crowded with people occupying themselves by different tasks, mostly seemingly oblivious of each other. In fact, in the distant Bohemia, where I grew up, the painter’s name at the time was still being used as a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
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