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, ge…