Pieter the Elder Bruegel (c. 1525-1569) was a Netherlandish painter and designer for engravings. His works provide a profound and elemental insight into man and his relationship to the world of nature.
Pieter Bruegel lived at a time when northern art was strongly influenced by Italian mannerism, but despite the requisite journey to Italy for purposes of study, he was astonishingly independent of the dominant artistic interests of his day. Instead, he deliberately revived the late Gothic style of Hieronymus Bosch as the point of departure for his own highly complex and original art.
Our major source of information concerning Bruegel is the Dutch biographer Karel van Mander, who wrote in 1604. This near-contemporary of the painter claims that Bruegel was born in a town of the same name near Breda on the modern Dutch-Belgian border. Most recent authorities, however, follow the Italian writer Guicciardini in designating the painter's birthplace as Breda itself.
From the fact that Bruegel entered the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551, we may infer that he was born between 1525 and 1530. His master, according to Van Mander, was the Antwerp painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Bruegel married in 1563. Between 1552 and 1553 Bruegel went to Italy, probably by way of France. He visited Rome, where he met the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whose will of 1578 lists three paintings by Bruegel. These works, which apparently were landscapes, have not survived.
About 1555 Bruegel returned to Antwerp by way of the Alps, which resulted in a number of exquisite drawings of mountain landscapes. These sketches, which form the basis for many of his later paintings, are not records of actual places but "composites" made in order to investigate the organic life of forms in nature.