Jan Brueghel the Elder

Jan Brueghel the Elder was born in 1568, the younger son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and grew up in the shadow of a Renaissance giant. By the early 1600s he had become court painter to the Archduke and Duchess Albert VII and Isabella, sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands, and a close friend and frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens - together they led Flemish Baroque painting for three decades. He worked across an enormous range: history paintings, allegorical scenes, seascapes, battle scenes, village life, hellfire and the underworld. But his innovation lay in what he invented - flower garland paintings, paradise landscapes, gallery paintings - and in the erudition he brought to them, a pictor doctus shaped by Counter-Reformation devotion and the scientific revolution's appetite for accurate description. He generally avoided large figures and often collaborated with others who painted those while he handled landscape backgrounds and, sometimes, the clothes. He died on 13 January 1625, nicknamed "Velvet," "Flower," and "Paradise" for the delicacy and range of what he'd made new.