Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Flemish painter, born somewhere in the southern Netherlands between about 1525 and 1530, who died in Brussels in 1569. He painted Hunters in the Snow, the Tower of Babel and the crowded village of the Netherlandish Proverbs. His nickname, Peasant Bruegel, is misleading: he sold his pictures to merchants and scholars, and he was no peasant.
Almost everything people repeat about his life comes from a single book, and that book was printed thirty five years after he died.
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The book is the Schilder-boeck, the lives of Netherlandish painters that Karel van Mander published in 1604. Van Mander was writing three and a half decades after Bruegel's death, and he tells good stories. Bruegel, he says, liked to dress as a peasant and go with a friend, Hans Franckert, to village weddings and fairs, so that he could watch the guests from inside the party.
He tells how Bruegel, living in Antwerp with a servant girl he might have married, grew tired of her lies and made a bargain: a notch on a stick for every lie, and when the stick was full, the wedding was off. Then Bruegel fell in love with the daughter of his old teacher's widow, a girl he had once carried in his arms, and married her instead.
The last story comes near the end of his life. According to Van Mander, Bruegel's wife burned some of his drawings while he lay ill, out of remorse or fear, because the words written on them were too sharp. What he left her instead was a small painting of a magpie on a gallows. The magpie will matter again later, and so will that word, sharp.
What You'll Discover
Where his name really comes from.
Whether he was really a peasant.
What he swallowed on the road to Italy.
Whose name sold his prints.
What the hunters bring home.
What he left his wife.