He was an apprentice of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayke he later married, and was in 1551 accepted as a master in the painters' guild of Antwerp. He traveled to Italy soon after, and then returned to Antwerp before settling in Brussels permanently 10 years later. He died there on 9 September 1569.
He was the father of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder who both became painters, but as they were still infants when their father died; neither received any training from him.
Bruegel specialized in landscapes populated by peasants, painted in a simpler style than the Italianate art that prevailed at the time. The most obvious influence on his art is the older Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch. He is nicknamed 'Peasant Brueghel' to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which "Brueghel" is being referred to.
He is often credited as being the first western painter to paint landscapes for their own sake, rather than as a backdrop to a religious allegory. His winter landscapes of 1565 are corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during the Little ice age.
Using abundant spirit and comic power, he created some of the early images of acute social protest in art history. Examples include paintings such as The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (a satire of the conflicts of the Reformation) and engravings like The Ass in the School and Strongboxes Battling Piggybanks. On his deathbed he reportedly ordered his wife to burn the most subversive of his drawings to protect his family from political persecution.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Brueghel_the_Elder
Text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
| Great father of Jan Brueghel le Jeune
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