He was an astoundingly inventive painter and draftsman, and, due to the continuity of the family trade and the industry that developed in prints after his works, Bruegel’s impact was widespread and long lasting.

One of the greatest Netherlandish artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30–1569) is best known today for his paintings of peasant life. Yet is was above all through his exceptional graphic work that he achieved widespread fame during the sixteenth century. His drawings and prints made after his designs, while based on traditional sources, are innovative and independent, and they are wide ranging in their subject matter. Among Bruegel's foremost achievements in the graphic realm is the naturalistic rendering of landscapes. In many instances inspired by the Alpine mountains and valleys the artists encountered during a journey in Italy he made as a young man, these views synthesize the imagery of Bruegel's Italian and Netherlandish predecessors at the same time they represent a new and highly influential departure: an independent landscape genre entirely focused on nature. Indeed, a sixteenth-century authors famously wrote of Bruegel, "he teaches us to represent ... the angular, rocky Alps, the dizzying views down into a deep valley, steep cliffs, pine trees that kiss the clouds, far distances, and rushing streams." The master also created a body of peerless figurative designs featuring demons, virtuous souls, fools, and faceless peasants tilling the land. In allegories, portrayals of proverbs, and biblical narratives he dissected the imperfections of human nature, giving free rein to his imagination and wicked sense of humor. Often Bruegel produced what one early observer called "fantasies and bizarre things, dreams, and imaginations" that were closely based on the work of Hieronymus Bosch and inspired his contemporaries to call him the second Bosch. Bruegel's graphic work has recently been the subject of scholarship that has reevaluated the parameters of his oeuvre, assigning to other artists drawings formerly believed to be by his hand and adding some new sheets to the canon. The new Bruegel who has emerged from these studies is the subject of this volume, which accompanies an exhibition held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—surprisingly the first major show devoted solely to the master's drawings and prints. In essays of interest to the general audience and scholars alike, an international group of experts discusses the artist's life; his contributions as a draftsman and as a designer of prints; his social and intellectual context; and the posthumous survival of his art. Entries on the more than 140 works included in the exhibition further illuminate the master's genius and reveal meanings hidden in the imagery. Every print and drawing in the exhibition is reproduced and numerous comparative illustrations are offered. Provenances and references for all works, a bibliography, and an index are supplied.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition From Van Eyck to Bruegel this book presents an overview of one of the great epochs of Western art as seen through the extensive collection of the Metropolitan Museum. The period covered, sometimes referred to as the northern Renaissance, encompasses a century and a quarter of unparalleled artistic innovation and achievement realized in the geographic area of modern Belgium and the Netherlands. It opens about 1425 with the legendary inventor of oil painting, Jan van Eyck, and concludes with one of the most original geniuses of European art, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Virtually every major master active during this era is represented, including Van Eyck, Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Dieric Bouts, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, Gerard David, Joos van Cleve, Quentin Massys, Jan Gossart, Bernard van Orley, Joachim Patinir, and Bruegel. Early Netherlandish artists pioneered a realistic style that redefined the nature of painting and the way contemporary viewers related to pictures. Through the use of a newly perfected oil technique, painters embraced the vastness and variety of the world and suggested the actuality of everyday life. The viewer becomes an active participant in the images these artists created, in which the sacred and the profane, the real and the imagined intermesh. The volume is arranged thematically to emphasize the ways artists employed realism as a strategy. Introductory essays illuminate aspects of early Netherlandish painting: the history of its critical fortunes and scholarship; its acquisition by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century patrons; its relationship to Italian Renaissance painting; and the building of the Museum's collection in this area. Shorter essays that precede chapters of entries on individual pictures address religious painting, portraiture, and workshop practice and the art market, as well as the Bruges painter Gerard David and Bruegel's role in the development of modern landscape painting. The texts are lavishly supported by illustrations of works in the Museum's collection as well as comparative material. This is the first catalogue to bring together all the Metropolitan's holdings of Netherlandish art—the largest such collection in the Western hemisphere. Written by a team of staff experts, it is a major contribution to the understanding and study of early Netherlandish painting. A map, provenances, references, biographies of the artists, an illustrated appendix of un-catalogued paintings in the collection, a glossary of terms, an extensive bibliography, and an index are provided.

This study is an important new account of the life and work of the Flemish master Petrus Christus. It is the first volume to focus specifically on the physical characteristics of his works as criteria for judging attribution, dating, and the extent to which he was indebted to Jan van Eyck and other artists for the development of his technique and style. The author's aim is to examine how certain works were made in order to solve some rather traditional questions of connoisseurship. Recent technical and archival investigations, the result of which are published here together for the first time, form the basis of a sophisticated reassessment of Christus. His relationship with van Eyck's workshop is explored. There is a careful description of his working methods, including his use of underdrawings and his exploration perspective. The results of dendrochronological analyses of many of his panels are also given. As important as this technical and art-historical evaluation is the social and biographical background that is provided. Christus is placed in the context of fifteenth-century Bruges, a wealthy and powerful city under the rule of the dukes of Burgundy. Its status as a ducal seat fostered a lively cultural life, and patrons for artistic undertakings were also found in the relatively large number of well-to-do citizens and foreign merchants who lived there. The economic, social, and political forces that affected Bruges are described, as is their impact on the city's community of artists, which included Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling. Throughout, the authors draw on archival documents relating to citizenship, public celebrations, contracts, and confraternities to describe artistic activity in Bruges and to construct Christus's cultural biography. This publication accompanies the most important exhibition of early Netherlandish paintings in the United States in more than three decades. Each of the twenty-seven works is discussed in an extended entry with a complete provenance, and a selected bibliography is provided. The authors of this major study of Petrus Christus are Maryan W. Ainsworth, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Paintings Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, Associate Professor, History of Medieval Art, University of Groningen.

Artist Laura McPhee reflects on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's _The Harvesters_ in this episode of The Artist Project.

“During my ten years of working as a guard at The Met, no picture rewarded my attention as consistently.”

Dutch and Flemish landscape paintings were rarely symbolic but were usually rich in associations, ranging from God and all of nature to national, regional, or local pride, agriculture and commerce, leisure time, and the sheer pleasure of physical sensation.

Among the most innovative and influential artists of his age, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1527—1569), was a remarkable draftsman and designer of prints as well as a painter. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 25 through December 2, 2001, this landmark exhibition will include 54 of the 61 extant drawings by Bruegel – a larger number than has ever been assembled for any previous exhibition. In addition, the exhibition will also include some 60 prints designed by him, and another 20 drawings by his contemporaries.

2016

"To have this whole symphony occurring in one image, that’s fantastic."

The Artist Project is an online series in which we give artists an opportunity to respond to our encyclopedic collection.

The largest number of drawings and prints by the beloved sixteenth-century Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder ever assembled