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The painting
titled The Misanthrope above might as well be a self-portrait of Bruegel,
as far as we are concerned. Very little is known about the personal life
of this painter, one of the greatest masters of art of any time.
Less than four dozen paintings and
about a hundred drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder have survived the
four and a half centuries (almost) that separate us from the painter’s
death. Nearly all of them are now considered masterpieces. Very little is
know about the artist’s early life, there is no certainty either about
the place and the time of birth, but he was probably born near Breda,
sometime after 1525. The reasons that lead him to changing his name from
Brueghel to Bruegel are also not known. His sons, Pieter Brueghel the
Younger and Jan Brueghel The Elder reverted to the older version of the
name. There were several other Bruegels who became well known in the art
world, but none has quite reached the fame of the founder of this
remarkable dynasty of the Flemish painters. The two sons of Bruegel,
Peiter and Jan, incidentally, were brought up after their parent’s
relatively early deaths by their grandmother, who was also a painter.
Bruegel seems to have studied in
Antwerp (now in Belgium) under Coecke van Aelst, and had spent several
years in Italy in the early 1550s. Eventually he settled in Brussels,
where he died on September 5, 1569.
We
can probably learn more from Bruegel’s paintings about the lives of
ordinary people in the 16th century Holland, of their customs,
traditions, proverbs, joys and fears, etc., than from any other source.
Bruegel’s paintings are usually highly symbolical, and they are often
crowded with people occupying themselves by different tasks, mostly
seemingly oblivious of each other. In fact, in the distant Bohemia, where
I grew up, the painter’s name at the time was still being used as a
synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
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