workshop produced the prints that were
fashionable in merchant and middle-class
families unable to afford commissioning
original paintings. A Brueghel drawing en-
titledBig Fish Eat Little Fishappeared in
1557, with the signature of the better-
known Hieronymus Bosch substituted for
Brueghel’s to boost sales. Bosch, then a re-
nowned Flemish painter, remained an im-
portant influence on Brueghel, and the
younger painter directly imitated him in
his 1558 series of engravings entitledSeven
Deadly Sinsas well as allegorical paintings,
includingThe Triumph of DeathandThe
Fall of the Rebel Angels.
Brueghel’s Combat of Carnival and
Lent, completed in 1559, was his first
signed painting. The painter was still mod-
eling his work on Bosch, but also using
stronger colors and arranging elements in
the picture to achieve a careful balance of
shapes and lines. TheNetherlandish Prov-
erbsandChildren’s Games,aswellasthe
Combat of Carnival and Lent,werecrowded
canvases of multiple scenes and symbolic
characters, all standing for the foibles and
follies of the everyday world. In this man-
ner Brueghel also paintedDulle Griefand
The Triumph of Death, a gloomy landscape
of fire, murder, and death that some histo-
rians believe was inspired by the religious
civil wars then consuming much of north-
ern Europe.The Tower of Babel, painted in
1563, is based on a biblical parable show-
ing the folly of human ambition and the
pretension to greatness.
Brueghel moved to Brussels, Belgium,
in 1563. In the last few years of his life, he
painted his most famous pieces, including
The Road to CavalryandThe Blind Lead-
ing the Blind. Brueghel won a commission
to paint a series of pictures of the seasons
and months. Five of these paintings have
survived to the present day and have be-
come icons of the northern Renaissance:
Hunters in the Snow, Dark Day, Hay Har-
vest, Wheat Harvest, andReturn of the
Herd. In beautifully rendered and vividly
colored compositions, these paintings
show man in harmony with a beneficent
nature. Brueghel in these paintings left be-
hind the religious context of medieval
painting, and rendered the world in its
natural visible state without the interfer-
ence of religious doctrine and symbolism.
Because of this approach to his art many
consider Brueghel to have been the first
truly “modern” painter.
Completed in 1566, Brueghel’sMassa-
cre of the Innocentswas the painter’s view
of the tyranny of Spain’s occupation of
the Netherlands. Brueghel gained his repu-
tation as a painter of peasant life through
two of his most famous pictures,Peasant
DanceandPeasant Wedding Feast. In these
paintings Brueghel made the human fig-
ures more prominent, using expressions,
poses, and colors to convey elemental hu-
man characteristics: joy, greed, hunger, stu-
pidity, innocence, exuberance, and bore-
dom.Peasant Wedding Feastshows not
only Brueghel’s masterful skill at rendering
forms, but also an uproarious sense of hu-
mor and great sympathy for the universal
condition.
One of Brueghel’s late works,Land of
Cockaigne,isareturntomedievalallegory.
The painter renders a knight, a peasant,
and a merchant, all of them slightly off
balance and falling victim to their weak-
nesses.Magpie on the Gallows, painted
about the same time, shows a gallows ris-
ing above a scene of peasants celebrating
in a field.
Brueghel’s son, known as Pieter Brue-
ghel the Younger (1564–1638), made his
living producing copies of his father’sBrueghel family