Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born sometime in the mid-1520s and trained as a painter before traveling to Italy, the expected pilgrimage for artists of his generation. He returned in 1555 and settled in Antwerp, where he spent years designing prints for the leading publisher of the day - prolific work, but not the work that would last. At the end of the 1550s he turned to painting as his main medium, and in the decade that followed he produced the landscapes and peasant scenes that would make him a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting: large canvases of common life and open land, genres he pioneered at scale. He painted no portraits, no religious subjects - the two pillars of Netherlandish art - and in that refusal built a new visual language. He died on 9 September 1569, probably in his early forties, leaving behind a body of work that would reach forward across centuries: Auden closed a poem on his Icarus, Tarkovsky and von Trier returned to his compositions in their films.