Pieter Bruegel the Elder
(1528/30 - 1569)

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Pieter Bruegel (the Elder) was a Flemish artist active in Antwerp and Brussels, famous for his paintings and drawings of landscapes and scenes of robust peasant life, and founder of a dynasty of artists that remained active well into the 17th century.  Bruegel's art is often seen as the last phase in the development of a long tradition of Netherlandish painting beginning with Jan van Eyck in the 15th century. This tradition transformed the abstraction of medieval art into a more empirical view of reality.   Austria 1969.  Detail of a drawing assumed to show Bruegel's self-portrait, issued in commemoration of the Albertina Museum's (Vienna) 200th anniversary.

Bruegel clearly rejected the influences of Italian Renaissance art and its classical foundations, which dominated the work of many of his Flemish contemporaries. Rather than mythological subjects, muscular nudes, and idealized scenes, Bruegel's art portrays figures observed from nature, acting out realistic situations in believable contemporary settings.   Unlike most other painters, Pieter Bruegel produced hardly any self-portraits, being disinclined to glorify his own person.   Occasionally, however, one may find a bearded figure occupying an unassuming position at the edge of a picture, a figure who might possibly be the painter himself.   One such example is this pen-and-Indian-Ink drawing "The Painter and the Patron" (also known as "The Painter and the Connoisseur")  See also the detail shown immediately above, issued by Austria.  Belgium 1969.  Souvenir sheet, showing a detail of the drawing depicting the artist and his patron who admires his work behind him.

Bruegel is thought to have come from the town of Breda, located in northern Brabant in present-day Holland. Born Pieter Brueghel, he later dropped the “h” from his name. Before he became a member of the painters' guild in Antwerp in 1551, he seems to have studied with Pieter Coecke in Brussels and worked for a short time in Malines (Mechelen).  After a trip to Italy between 1552 and 1555, Bruegel returned to Antwerp. In 1563 he married Coecke's daughter, Maria Coecke van Aelst, and moved to Brussels, where he resided until his death in September 1569. Their two children, Pieter the Younger and Jan, both became painters of some renown. 

• Belgium 1976.  "Winter Landscape with a Bird-Trap".  The stamp is scanned from a booklet pane of four different art stamps, issued in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts.  

• Liberia 1969. Hunters returning home in the snow. Created 1565. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 

• Romania 1990. Spring. National Museum of Art, Bucharest. At the top of the stamp is written "tablouri impuscate", meaning "damaged paintings". See also the painting by Pieter Bruegel's son, Jan Bruegel, at the bottom of this page, where there is more detailed information about the incident that damaged the art works. 

Late in the 1550s, Bruegel began a series of large painted panels with complex compositions depicting various aspects of Flemish folk life. The earliest of these is an encyclopedic portrayal of common sayings, "Netherlandish Proverbs" (1559), followed by "Combat Between Carnival and Lent" (1559) and "Children's Games" (1560). 

• Belgium 1969. Pane of six se-tenant stamps in a composite design, depicting a detail of the huge panel "Children's Games". Bruegel has portrayed over 250 children on this panel.  They are playing with pieces of wood, with bones, with hoops and barrels -- specially crafted toys were rare in the 16th century.  Their faces often appear ageless; perhaps the painter wished to warn the observer against frittering away his life as if it were a childlike game.  Because the colours overlap the perforations I have preferred to scan the pane against a white background for a better view.  

All Bruegel's paintings are marked by a perceptive observation of human nature, a pervasive wit, and the vitality of his peasant figures. Remarkably simple in their composition, these figures are outstanding in their description of the harsh peasant life and the struggle for surviving. Both stamps are semi-postals, issued for the benefit of the FAO Campaign "Freedom from Hunger". Seen from a philatelic art collector's view an excellent choice of subject for the stamps :-) 

• Belgium 1963. "The Sewer", painted 1568.  

• Belgium 1963. "The Summer". painted 1568. Note that "The Summer" in philatelic catalogues is known as "The Harvest". On the far right is a fragment of the painting, shown in blue print. The painting belongs to Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Germany). Click here to see the full image. The link will open in a new window. 

Later examples of peasant folk subjects include "Peasant Dance" and "Peasant Wedding" (both 1568).  The below two stamps both show a detail from the painting "Peasant Dance".  With this work Bruegel created an entirely new genre: the farmer and his life were artistically immortalized for the first time.  I find it interesting to see how differently the same painting can turn out on a stamp in different layouts and printing methods. 

Throughout his life Bruegel felt attracted to the harsh life of farmers, who until that time was only tolerated at best, but in "Peasant Dance" became a hero.  The painting belongs to the Albertina Museum in Vienna.  

Modern scholars are far from interpreting Bruegel's art as simple whimsical folk subjects painted by an artist from mere peasant stock, as the  painter and art historian Karel van Mander described him in 1604. Recent writers see him as a knowledgeable man who was known to be a friend of such intellectuals as geographer and cartographer Abraham Ortelius, the latter having said: 

"Those painters who, painting graceful creatures in the prime of life, seek to superimpose on the painted subject some further element of charm or elegance sprung from their free imagination disfigure the entire portrayed creation, are untrue to their model, and thereby deviate to an equal extent from true beauty.  Our Bruegel is free from this fault".

Bruegel's pictures have been variously interpreted as referring to the beliefs of different religious thinkers, to the conflicts between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, to the political domination of the Lowlands by the Spanish, and as visual equivalents to dramatic allegories performed publicly by Flemish societies of rhetoric.  

• Belgium 1969.  Detail of the painting "Census of Bethlehem", painted c. 1566.  Oil painting on wood.  The painting is probably referring to the Duke of Alba's ruthless persecution of thousands of Netherlanders in his striving to convert the Protestants to Catholicism.  

• Belgium 1982.  Detail of "The 'Little' Tower of Babel", painted c. 1563.  Bruegel painted this subject at least three times, and two of these paintings have survived.  The "big" tower hangs in Vienna, and the "little" one in Rotterdam.  The subject matter refers to the multitude of languages spoken in the area:  Flemish, Dutch, German, French, Spanish.  The stamp was issued at the occasion of the Esperanto World Congress 1982 in Antwerp.  An interesting subject matter to choose for the occasion!  

Bruegel was living in Brussels when the Duke of Alba led his army into the city in August 1567.  The Duke had been sent by Philip II, the Spanish king, to whose empire the Netherlands provinces belonged.  The commander's orders were to forcibly convert the Protestants; during the years that followed he would have several thousand Netherlanders sentenced to death.  This extreme harshness resulted first in an uprising, and then in a war that lasted eighty years, ending with the division of the land into Catholic Belgium (as it would later become known) in the south and Protestant Holland in the north.  The year 1567, in which King Philip and the Duke of Alba entered Brussels, would bring the great turning point in the history of the Netherlands provinces, and Bruegel was to witness the events from close to. 

As mentioned above, Pieter Bruegel's son, Jan Bruegel, who lived 1568-1626, also became a painter of some renown, and his works have appeared on a number of stamps. The most interesting one is this painting of "Vase with Flowers", issued by Romania in 1990 in the above mentioned series of damaged paintings in the National Art Museum in Bucharest. 

Sources and links: 

• Microsoft Encarta 2002. 
• Encyclopedia Britannica 2002. 

• E.H. Gombrich: "Story of the Art" (Danish Edition, ISBN 87-01-79921-5). 

• Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen:  "Bruegel - The Complete Paintings".  ISBN 3-8228-5001-5   
• Online Gallery of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's paintings

Other Renaissance Artists on this site: 

Giuseppe Arcimboldi  Botticelli Leonardo Raphael  Titian  El Greco

Michelangelo  Tintoretto  Durer  Tapestry Lady with Unicorn

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