Pieter Bruegel The Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) was a Netherlandish painter and print designer of the Renaissance, probably born near Breda. He became a free master in the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551 and travelled to Italy around 1552–54. Back in Antwerp, he mainly designed prints for the publisher Hieronymus Cock, and from the late 1550s painting became his principal medium. He moved to Brussels around 1563 and married Mayken Coecke that year. Bruegel is known for large panoramic landscapes and crowded peasant scenes full of proverbs, games and moral comment. Among them are Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), The Tower of Babel (1563), The Hunters in the Snow (1565) and The Peasant Wedding (1568). Unusually for the period, he painted no portraits. He died in Brussels in September 1569, still in his early forties. His sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder also became painters.