Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born around 1525, although neither the exact year nor the precise location of his birth is securely known. He became one of the most important artists of the sixteenth-century Netherlands.
Little documentation survives concerning his childhood or earliest training. He was probably trained by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, an important Antwerp painter and designer whose daughter Mayken Bruegel later married.
Bruegel became a master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1551. Antwerp was then one of Europe's most important commercial and artistic centers.
Soon afterward he traveled through France and Italy. The mountainous landscapes he encountered during this journey had a lasting effect upon his art.
During the 1550s Bruegel worked extensively as a draftsman. Many of his designs were translated into prints and published by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp. This allowed Bruegel's imagery to circulate widely.
His early designs include landscapes as well as fantastic and moralizing subjects. The influence of the earlier Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch can be seen particularly clearly in some of these works.
Bruegel increasingly turned to painting during the final decade of his life. Only a relatively small number of paintings by him survive, but many have become among the best-known works of Northern Renaissance art.
In 1563 Bruegel married Mayken Coecke and moved from Antwerp to Brussels. He continued producing paintings for important private collectors.
Among his patrons was the Antwerp merchant Nicolaes Jonghelinck, who owned a substantial group of Bruegel's paintings. These included the celebrated series devoted to the seasons or months of the year.
Bruegel became particularly known for landscapes and scenes involving peasants, villagers, and ordinary human activity. These subjects led later generations to call him "Peasant Bruegel," although that nickname gives an incomplete picture of the sophistication and range of his art.
Biblical subjects also occupied an important place in his mature work. Rather than separating sacred history from everyday experience, Bruegel frequently placed biblical events within landscapes and communities resembling sixteenth-century northern Europe.
This approach could radically change the viewer's experience of a familiar story. A biblical event might occupy only a small portion of an enormous composition while people nearby continue working, traveling, talking, or pursuing their own concerns.
Bruegel died in Brussels in 1569. His sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder both became successful painters, although they were still children when their father died.
The younger Pieter later produced numerous versions of his father's compositions. As a result, works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder must be carefully distinguished from paintings produced by his sons, followers, and later copyists.