Pieter Bruegel the Elder was among the most significant artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes ; he was a pioneer in presenting both types of subject as large paintings.
Paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Hunters in the Snow (1565)
The Hunters in the Snow (Dutch: Jagers in de Sneeuw), also known as The Return of the Hunters, is a 1565 oil-on-wood painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Northern Renaissance work is one of a series of works, five of which still survive, that depict different times of the year. The painting is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. This scene is set in the depths of winter during December/January.
The Hunters in the Snow, and the series to which it belongs, are in the medieval and early Renaissance tradition of the Labours of the Months: depictions of various rural activities and work understood by a spectator in Bruegel's time as representing the different months or times of the year. For in 1565, this was the beginning of upcoming harsh winters, called the Little Ice Age.
Netherlandish Proverbs (1559)
Netherlandish Proverbs (Dutch: Nederlandse Spreekwoorden; also called Flemish Proverbs, The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World) is a 1559 oil-on-oak-panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that depicts a scene in which humans and, to a lesser extent, animals and objects, offer literal illustrations of Dutch-language proverbs and idioms.
Running themes in Bruegel's paintings that appear in Netherlandish Proverbs are the absurdity, wickedness and foolishness of humans. Its original title, The Blue Cloak or The Folly of the World, indicates that Bruegel's intent was not just to illustrate proverbs, but rather to catalogue human folly. Many of the people depicted show the characteristic blank features that Bruegel used to portray fools.
The Triumph of Death (1560)
The Triumph of Death is an oil panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted c. 1562. It has been in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1827.
The painting shows a panorama of an army of skeletons wreaking havoc across a blackened, desolate landscape. Fires burn in the distance, and the sea is littered with shipwrecks.
The Peasant Wedding (1568)
The Peasant Wedding is a 1567 genre painting by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel the Elder, one of his many depicting peasant life. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Pieter Bruegel the Elder enjoyed painting peasants and different aspects of their lives in so many of his paintings that he has been called Peasant-Bruegel, but he was an intellectual, and many of his paintings have a symbolic meaning as well as a moral aspect.
The bride is in front of the green textile wall-hanging, with a paper-crown hung above her head. She is also wearing a crown and sitting passively amidst the hearty eating and drinking around her. The bridegroom is not immediately obvious. The feast is in a barn in the summertime; two sheaves of grain with a rake recalls the work of harvesting, and the hard peasant life. Porters carry plates on a door taken off its hinges. The main food is bread, porridge and soup. Two pipers play the pijpzak, an unbreeched boy in the foreground licks a plate, a wealthy man at the far right is talking to a Franciscan friar, a dog emerges from under the table to snatch pieces of bread on the bench. The scene is said to accurately depict 16th-century peasant wedding customs.
The Blind Leading the Blind (1568)
The Blind Leading the Blind, Blind, or The Parable of the Blind (Dutch: De parabel der blinden) is a painting by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, completed in 1568. Executed in distemper on linen canvas, it measures 86 cm × 154 cm (34 in × 61 in). It depicts the Biblical parable of the blind leading the blind from Matthew 15:14, and is in the collection of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy.
The painting reflects Bruegel's mastery of observation. Each figure has a different eye affliction, including corneal leukoma, atrophy of globe and removed eyes. The men hold their heads aloft to make better use of their other senses. The diagonal composition reinforces the off-kilter motion of the six figures falling in progression. It is considered a masterwork for its accurate detail and composition. Copies include a larger version by Bruegel's son Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and the work has inspired literature such as poetry by Charles Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams, and a novel by Gert Hofmann.
The Harvesters (painting) (1565)
The Harvesters is an oil painting on wood completed by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1565. It depicts the harvest time set in a landscape, in the months of July and August or late summer. Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a merchant banker and art collector from Antwerp, commissioned this painting as part of a cycle of six paintings depicting various seasonal transitions during the year.
The painting is one in a series of six (or perhaps twelve) works, five of which are still extant, that depict different times of the year. As in many of his paintings, the focus is on peasants and their work and does not have the religious themes common in landscape works of the time. Notably, some of the peasants are shown eating while others are harvesting wheat, a depiction of both the production and consumption of food. Pears can be seen on the white cloth in front of the upright sitting woman who eats bread and cheese while a figure in the tree to the far right picks pears. The painting shows a large number of activities representative of the 16th-century Belgian rural life. For example, on the far right a person is shaking apples from the tree. In the center left of the painting, a group of villagers can be seen participating in the blood sport of cock throwing. The painting has been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City since 1919. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls this painting a “watershed in the history of Western art” and the “first modern landscape”. A sense of distance is conveyed by the workers carrying sheaves of wheat through the clearing, the people bathing in the pond, the children playing and the ships far away.
Massacre of the Innocents (Bruegel) (1566)
Several oil-on-oak-panel versions of The Massacre of the Innocents were painted by 16th-century Netherlandish painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger. The work translates the Biblical account of the Massacre of the Innocents into a winter scene in the Southern Netherlands in the prelude to the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule, also known as the Eighty Years' War.
What is now thought to be the only version by Bruegel the Elder (c.1565-1567) is in the British Royal Collection; for some time at Hampton Court Palace, since 2017 (to late 2024) it has been in Windsor Castle. It appears that Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor ordered it overpainted to hide images of dead and dying children, which have been replaced by food items and sacks of goods.
The Magpie on the Gallows (1568)
The Magpie on the Gallows (German: Die Elster auf dem Galgen) is a 1568 oil-on-wood panel painting by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is now in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, in Darmstadt.
The painting shows a world landscape, with the foreground a woodland clearing containing three peasants dancing to a bagpipes, next to a gallows upon which a magpie is perched. The gallows stands in the centre of the picture, dividing the painting in two, a Mannerist composition with the right side more "open" and left more "closed", with the magpie close to the exact centre of the painting. The gallows appears to form an "impossible object", similar to a Penrose triangle, with the bases of the posts seemingly planted side by side, but with the right side of the cross-member receding into the distance, and contradictory lighting.
Children's Games (Bruegel) (1560)
Children's Games is an oil-on-panel by Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1560. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The entire composition is full of children playing a wide variety of games. Over 90 different games that were played by children at the time have been identified.
This painting, mentioned for the first time by Karel van Mander in 1604, was acquired in 1594 by Archduke Ernest of Austria. It was suggested that it was the first in a projected series of paintings representing the Ages of Man, in which Children's Games would have stood for Youth. If that was Bruegel's intention, it is unlikely that the series progressed beyond this painting, for there are no contemporary or subsequent mentions of related pictures.
Dull Gret (1563)
Dulle Griet (anglicized as Dull Gret), also known as Mad Meg, is a figure of Flemish folklore who is best known as the subject of a 1563 oil-on-panel by Flemish renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The painting depicts a virago, Dulle Griet, who leads an army of women to pillage Hell, and is currently held and exhibited at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, in Antwerp. Dulle Griet is also the subject of at least two more paintings by other artists: a 1640s painting by Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger and a 1650s painting by David Ryckaert III.
A restoration of the painting in 2018 revealed that it was painted in 1563, shortly after the painter had moved to Brussels. Previously, the signature and the date on the painting had been illegible, and it was assumed that it was painted two years earlier, or, based on its close compositional and stylistic similarity to The Fall of the Rebel Angels and The Triumph of Death, one year earlier. Like those pictures, Dulle Griet owes much to Hieronymus Bosch. It is assumed the painting was destined for a series.
The Return of the Herd (1565)
The Return of the Herd is a panel painting in oils by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, made in 1565. It is one in a series of six works (High Springtime is presumed lost) that depict different seasons. The painting is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. The autumnal colors of the landscape and the bare trees connect this particular painting to October/November.
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559)
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (Dutch: De strijd tussen Vasten en Vastenavond) is an oil-on-panel painting executed by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1559. It is a panorama of contemporary life in the Southern Netherlands. While the painting contains nearly 200 characters, it is unified under the theme of the transition from Shrove Tuesday to Lent, the period forty days before Easter.
The literary theme of the struggle between personifications of Shrove Tuesday and Lent dates as far back as the year 400 with the Psychomachia. The 13th-century French poem La Bataille de Caresme et de Charnage describes a symbolic battle between different foods, meat against fish. A likely graphic precursor of the painting is Lent and Carnival, a 1558 etching by Hieronymus Cock after Frans Hogenberg, in which the personifications of lean and fat are driven together on carts by their supporters. The supporters attack each other with fish, waffles, cookies and eggs.