He was a formative influence onDutch Golden Age painting and later painting in general in his innovative choices of subject matter, as one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting. He also painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to settle inAntwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer ofprints for the leading publisher of the day. At the end of the 1550s, he made painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the following period of little more than a decade before his early death in 1569, when he was probably in his early forties.
Engraving designed by Bruegel and published byHieronymus Cock,The Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Vices – Anger, 1558
Bruegel's birth date is not documented, but inferred from the fact that Bruegel entered the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551. This usually happened between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, giving a range for his birth between 1525 and 1530.[7] His master, according toKarel van Mander, was the Antwerp painterPieter Coecke van Aelst.[8]
The two main early sources for Bruegel's biography areLodovico Guicciardini's account of the Low Countries (1567) and Karel van Mander's 1604Schilder-boeck.[9] Guicciardini recorded that Bruegel was born inBreda, but van Mander specified that Bruegel was born in a village (dorp) near Breda called "Brueghel",[10] which does not fit any known place.[11] Nothing at all is known of his family background. Van Mander seems to assume he came from a peasant background, in keeping with the over-emphasis on Bruegel's peasant genre scenes given by van Mander and many early art historians and critics.[12]
In contrast, scholars of the last six decades have emphasised the intellectual content of his work, and conclude: "There is, in fact, every reason to think that Pieter Bruegel was a townsman and a highly educated one, on friendly terms with the humanists of his time",[13] ignoring van Mander'sdorp and just placing his childhood in Breda itself.[12] Breda was already a significant centre as the base of theHouse of Orange-Nassau, with a population of some 8,000,[14] although 90% of its 1300 houses were destroyed in a fire in 1534. This reversal can be taken to excess; although Bruegel moved in highly educatedhumanist circles, it seems "he had not mastered Latin", and had others add the Latin captions in some of his drawings.[15]
Between 1545 and 1550, he was a pupil of Pieter Coecke, who died on 6 December 1550.[16] Before this, Bruegel was already working inMechelen, where he is documented between September 1550 and October 1551 assistingPeeter Baltens on an altarpiece (now lost), painting the wings ingrisaille.[13] Bruegel possibly got this work via the connections ofMayken Verhulst, the wife of Pieter Coecke. Mayken's father and eight siblings were all artists or married artists, and lived in Mechelen.[17]
In 1551, Bruegel became a free master in theGuild of Saint Luke of Antwerp. He set off for Italy soon after, probably by way of France. He visitedRome and, rather adventurously for the period, by 1552 had reachedReggio Calabria at the southern tip of the mainland, where a drawing records the city in flames after a Turkish raid.[18] He probably continued toSicily, but by 1553 was back in Rome. There he met the miniaturistGiulio Clovio, whose will of 1578 lists paintings by Bruegel; in one case, a joint work. These works, apparently landscapes, have not survived, but marginal miniatures in manuscripts by Clovio are attributed to Bruegel.[19]
He left Italy by 1554, and had reached Antwerp by 1555, when the set of prints to his designs known as theLarge Landscapes were published byHieronymus Cock, the most important print publisher of northern Europe. Bruegel's return route is uncertain, but much of the debate over it was made irrelevant in the 1980s when it was realised that the celebrated series of large drawings of mountain landscapes thought to have been made on the trip were not by Bruegel at all.[21] All the drawings from the trip that are considered authentic are of landscapes; unlike most other 16th-century artists visiting Rome, he seems to have ignored both classical ruins and contemporary buildings.[22]
From 1555 until 1563, Bruegel lived in Antwerp, then the publishing centre of northern Europe, mainly working as a designer of over forty prints for Cock, though his dated paintings begin in 1557.[23] With one exception, Bruegel did not work the plates himself, but produced a drawing which Cock's specialists worked from. From 1559, he dropped the 'h' from his name and signed his paintings asBruegel; his relatives continued to use "Brueghel" or "Breughel". He moved in the livelyhumanist circles of the city, and his change of name (or at least its spelling) in 1559 can be seen as an attempt to Latinise it; at the same time he changed the script he signed in from the Gothicblackletter to Roman capitals.[13]
In 1563, he married Pieter Coecke van Aelst's daughterMayken Coecke inBrussels, where he lived for the remainder of his short life. Antwerp was the capital of Netherlandish commerce and the art market;[24] Brussels was the centre of government. Van Mander tells a story that his mother-in-law pushed for the move to distance him from his established servant girl mistress.[25] By now, painting had become his main activity, and his most famous works come from these years. His paintings were much sought after, with patrons including wealthy Flemish collectors andCardinal Granvelle, in effect theHabsburg chief minister, who was based in Mechelen. Bruegel had two sons, both well known as painters, and a daughter about whom nothing is known. These werePieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638) andJan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625); he died too early to train either of them. He died in Brussels on 9 September 1569 and was buried in theKapellekerk.[26]
Van Mander records that before he died he told his wife to burn some drawings, perhaps designs for prints, carrying inscriptions "which were too sharp or sarcastic ... either out of remorse or for fear that she might come to harm or in some way be held responsible for them", which has led to much speculation that they were politically or doctrinally provocative, in a climate of sharp tension in these areas.[13]
The Procession to Calvary, 1564, Bruegel's second largest painting at 124 cm × 170 cm (49 in × 67 in)
Bruegel was born at a time of extensive change in Western Europe. Humanist ideals from the previous century influenced artists and scholars. Italy was at the end of its High Renaissance of arts and culture, when artists such asMichelangelo andLeonardo da Vinci painted their masterpieces. In 1517, about eight years before Bruegel's birth,Martin Luther created hisNinety-five Theses and began theProtestant Reformation in neighbouring Germany. Reformation was accompanied byiconoclasm and widespreaddestruction of art, including in theLow Countries. The Catholic Church viewed Protestantism and its destructive iconoclasm of art as a threat to the Church. TheCouncil of Trent, which concluded in 1563,determined that religious art should be more focused on religious subject-matter and less on material things and decorative qualities.
At this time, the Low Countries were divided intoSeventeen Provinces, some of which wanted separation from the Habsburg rule based in Spain. The Reformation, meanwhile, produced a number of Protestant denominations that gained followers in the Seventeen Provinces, influenced by the newly Lutheran German states to the east and the newly Anglican England to the west. The Habsburg monarchs of Spain attempted a policy of strict religious uniformity for the Catholic Church within their domains and enforced it with theInquisition. Increasing religious antagonisms and riots, political manoeuvrings, and executions eventually resulted in the outbreak of theEighty Years' War.
In this atmosphere, Bruegel reached the height of his career as a painter. Two years before his death, the Eighty Years' War began between the United Provinces and Spain. Although Bruegel did not live to see it, seven provinces became independent and formed theDutch Republic, while the other ten remained under Habsburg control at the end of the war.[27]
Pieter Bruegel specialised ingenre paintings populated by peasants, often with a landscape element, though he also painted religious works. Making the life and manners of peasants the main focus of a work was rare in painting in Bruegel's time, and he was a pioneer of the genre painting. Many of his peasant paintings fall into two groups in terms of scale and composition, both of which were original and influential on later painting. His earlier style shows dozens of small figures, seen from a high viewpoint, and spread fairly evenly across the central picture space. The setting is typically an urban space surrounded by buildings, within which the figures have a "fundamentally disconnected manner of portrayal", with individuals or small groups engaged in their own distinct activity, while ignoring all the others.[28]
His earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dances, and games—are unique windows on a vanished folk culture, though still characteristic of Belgian life and culture today, and a prime source oficonographic evidence about both physical and social aspects of 16th-century life. For example, his famous paintingNetherlandish Proverbs, originallyThe Blue Cloak, illustrates dozens of then-contemporaryaphorisms, many of which still are in use in current Flemish, French, English and Dutch.[29] The Flemish environment provided a large artistic audience for proverb-filled paintings because proverbs were well known and recognisable as well as entertaining.Children's Games shows the variety of amusements enjoyed by young people. His winter landscapes of 1565, likeThe Hunters in the Snow, are taken as corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during theLittle Ice Age. Bruegel often painted community events, as inThe Peasant Wedding andThe Fight Between Carnival and Lent. In paintings likeThe Peasant Wedding, Bruegel painted individual, identifiable people, while the people inThe Fight Between Carnival and Lent are unidentifiable, muffin-facedallegories of greed or gluttony.
Bruegel also painted religious scenes in a wide Flemish landscape setting, as in theConversion of Paul andThe Sermon of St. John the Baptist. Even if Bruegel's subject matter was unconventional, the religious ideals and proverbs driving his paintings were typical of the Northern Renaissance. He accurately depicted people with disabilities, such as inThe Blind Leading the Blind, which depicted a quote from the Bible: "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" (Matthew 15:14). Using the Bible to interpret this painting, the six blind men are symbols of the blindness of mankind in pursuing earthly goals instead of focusing on Christ's teachings.
Using abundant spirit and comic power, Bruegel created some of the very early images of acute social protest in art history. Examples include paintings such asThe Fight Between Carnival and Lent (a satire of the conflicts of theProtestant Reformation) and engravings likeThe Ass in the School andStrongboxes Battling Piggybanks.[30]
In the 1560s, Bruegel moved to a style showing only a few large figures, typically in a landscape background without a distant view. His paintings, dominated by their landscapes, take a middle course as regards both the number and size of figures.
Bruegel adapted and made more natural theworld landscape style, which shows small figures in an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. Back in Antwerp from Italy he was commissioned in the 1550s by the publisherHieronymus Cock to make drawings for a series ofengravings, theLarge Landscapes, to meet what was now a growing demand for landscape images.
Some of his earlier paintings, such as hisLandscape with the Flight into Egypt (Courtauld, 1563), are fully within the Patinir conventions, but hisLandscape with the Fall of Icarus (known from two copies) had a Patinir-style landscape, in which already the largest figure was agenre figure who was only a bystander for the supposed narrative subject, and may not even be aware of it. The date of Bruegel's lost original is unclear,[31] but it is probably relatively early, and if so, foreshadows the trend of his later works. During the 1560s, the early scenes crowded with multitudes of very small figures, whether peasant genre figures or figures in religious narratives, give way to a small number of much larger figures.
His well-known set of landscapes with genre figures depicting the seasons are the culmination of his landscape style; the five surviving paintings use the basic elements of the world landscape (only one lacks craggy mountains) but transform them into his own style. They are larger than most previous works, with agenre scene with several figures in the foreground, and the panoramic view seen past or through trees.[32] Bruegel was also aware of theDanube School's landscape style throughold master prints.[33] The surviving five paintings areThe Gloomy Day (February-March),The Hunters in the Snow (December-January), andThe Return of the Herd (October-November) which are on display in theKunsthistorisches Museum inVienna;The Hay Harvest (June-July) is on display in theLobkowicz Palace inPrague; andThe Harvesters (July-August) which is on display at the Metropolitan in New York. The painting associated with the April-May seasonal transition is assumed to be lost.
The series on the months of the year includes several of Bruegel's best-known works. In 1565, a wealthy patron in Antwerp,Niclaes Jonghelinck, commissioned him to paint a series of paintings of each month of the year. There has been a dispute among art historians as to whether the series originally included six or twelve works.[34]Joseph Koerner in his 2018 bookBosch and Bruegel states that Archduke Ernst, who took possession of the paintings after Niclaes defaulted on taxes, had as early as 1569 inventoried only six paintings in this series during the year of Bruegel's death.[35] The collection is next inventoried to be in the possession of Archduke Leopold who in 1659 indicated that five of them were extant.[36] Only five of these paintings are known to have survived into the 21st century. Traditional Flemish luxurybooks of hours (e.g., theTrès Riches Heures du Duc de Berry;[29] 1416) had calendar pages that included theLabours of the Months, depictions set in landscapes of the agricultural tasks, weather, and social life typical for that month.
Bruegel's paintings were on a far larger scale than a typical calendar page painting, each one approximately three feet by five feet. For Bruegel, this was a large commission (the price of a commission was based on how large the painting was) and an important one. In 1565, the Calvinist riots began, and it was only two years before the Eighty Years' War broke out. Bruegel may have felt safer with a secular commission so as not to offend Calvinists or Catholics.[37] Some of the most famous paintings from this series includedThe Hunters in the Snow (December–January) andThe Harvesters (August-September).
On his return from Italy to Antwerp, Bruegel earned his living producing drawings to be turned into prints for the leading print publisher of the city, and indeed northern Europe,Hieronymus Cock. At his "House of the Four Winds" Cock ran a production and distribution operation, efficiently producing prints of many sorts that were more concerned with sales than the finest artistic achievement. Most of Bruegel's prints come from this period, but he continued to produce drawn designs for prints until the end of his life, leaving only two completed out of a series of theFour Seasons.[38] The prints were popular and it is reasonable to assume that all those published have survived. In many cases, Bruegel's drawings also exist. Although the subject matter of his graphic work was often continued in his paintings, there are considerable differences in emphases between the twooeuvres. To his contemporaries and for long after, until public museums and good reproductions of the paintings made these better known, Bruegel was much better known through his prints than his paintings, which largely explains the critical assessment of him as merely the creator of comic peasant scenes.[39]
The prints are mostly engravings, though from about 1559 onwards some areetchings or mixtures of both techniques.[40] Only one completewoodcut was made from a Bruegel design, with another left incomplete. This,The Dirty Wife, is a most unusual survival (nowMetropolitan Museum of Art) of a drawing on the wooden block intended for printing. For some reason, the specialistblock-cutter who carved away the block, following the drawing while also destroying it, had only done one corner of the design before stopping work. The design then appears as an engraving, perhaps soon after Bruegel's death.[41]
Spring, 1565, a drawing made to be engraved. It was apparently never painted by Bruegel himself, but after his death came dozens of versions in paint by his son and others.
Among his greatest successes were a series of allegories, among several designs adopting many of the very individual mannerisms of his compatriotHieronymus Bosch:The Seven Deadly Sins andThe Virtues. The sinners are grotesque and unidentifiable while the allegories of virtue often wear odd headgear.[37] That imitations of Bosch sold well is demonstrated by his drawingBig Fish Eat Little Fish (held in theAlbertina museum collection), which Bruegel signed but Cock shamelessly attributed to Bosch in the print version.[20]
Although Bruegel presumably made them, no drawings that are clearly preparatory studies for paintings survive. Most surviving drawings are finished designs for prints, or landscape drawings that are fairly finished. After a considerable purge of attributions in recent decades, led byHans Mielke,[13] sixty-one sheets of drawings are now generally agreed to be by Bruegel.[42] A new "Master of the Mountain Landscapes" has emerged from the carnage. Mielke's key observation was that the lily watermark on the paper of several sheets was only found from around 1580 onwards, which led to the rapid acceptance of his proposal.[43] Another group of about twenty-five pen drawings of landscapes, many signed and dated as by Bruegel, are now attributed toJacob Savery, probably from the decade of so before his death in 1603. A giveaway was that two drawings, including the walls ofAmsterdam, were dated 1563 but included elements only built in the 1590s. This group appears to have been made as deliberate forgeries.[44]
Around 1563, Bruegel moved from Antwerp to Brussels, where he married Mayken Coecke, the daughter of the painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst andMayken Verhulst. As registered in the archives of theCathedral of Antwerp, theirdeposition for marriage was registered on 25 July 1563. The marriage was concluded in theChapel Church, Brussels in 1563.[45][46]
Pieter the Elder had two sons: Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder (both kept their name as Brueghel). Their grandmother, Mayken Verhulst, trained the sons because "the Elder" died when both were very small children. The older brother, Pieter Brueghel, copied his father's style and compositions with competence and considerable commercial success. Jan was much more original and very versatile. He was an important figure in the transition to the Baroque style inFlemish Baroque painting andDutch Golden Age painting in a number of its genres. He was often a collaborator with other leading artists, including withPeter Paul Rubens on many works, including theAllegory of Sight.
Other members of the family includeJan van Kessel the Elder (grandson of Jan Brueghel the Elder) andJan van Kessel the Younger. ThroughDavid Teniers the Younger, son-in-law of Jan Brueghel the Elder, the family is also related to the whole Teniers family of painters and the Quellinus family of painters and sculptors, through the marriage ofJan-Erasmus Quellinus to Cornelia, daughter of David Teniers the Younger.
Bruegel's art was long more highly valued by collectors than critics. His friendAbraham Ortelius described him in a friendship album in 1574 as "the most perfect painter of his century", but bothVasari and Van Mander see him as essentially a comic successor to Hieronymus Bosch.[47] As well as being forward-looking, his art reinvigorates medieval subjects such as marginaldrolleries of ordinary life inilluminated manuscripts, and the calendar scenes of agricultural labours set in landscape backgrounds, and puts these on a much larger scale than before, and in the expensive medium ofoil painting. He does the same with the fantastic and anarchic world developed in Renaissance prints and book illustrations.[48]
Bruegel's work was, as far as we know, always keenly collected. The banker Nicolaes Jonghelinck owned sixteen paintings; his brotherJacques Jonghelinck was a gentleman-sculptor and medallist, who also had significant business interests. He made medals and tombs in an international style for the Brussels elite, especiallyCardinal Granvelle, who was also a keen patron of Bruegel.[49] Granvelle owned at least two Bruegels, including theCourtauldFlight into Egypt, but we do not know if he bought them directly from the artist.[50] Granvelle's nephew and heir was strong-armed out of his Bruegels byRudolf II, the very acquisitive Austrian Habsburg Emperor. The series of theMonths entered the Habsburg collections in 1594, given to Rudolf's brother and later taken by the emperor himself. Rudolf eventually owned at least ten Bruegel paintings.[51] A generation later Rubens owned eleven or twelve, which mostly passed to the Antwerp senator Pieter Stevens, and were then sold in 1668.[52]
Bruegel's son Pieter could still keep himself and a large studio team busy producing replicas or adaptations of Bruegel's works, as well as his own compositions along similar lines, sixty years or more after they were first painted. The most frequently copied works were generally not the ones that are most famous today, though this may reflect the availability of the full-scale, detailed drawings that were evidently used. The most-copied painting is theWinter Landscape with (Skaters and) a Bird Trap (1565), of which the original is in Brussels; 127 copies are recorded.[54] They include paintings after some of Bruegel's drawn print designs, especiallySpring.[55]
The next century's artists of peasant genre scenes were heavily influenced by Brueghel.[55] Outside the Brueghel family, early figures wereAdriaen Brouwer (c. 1605/6 – 1638) andDavid Vinckboons (1576 – c. 1632), both Flemish-born but spending much of their time in the northern Netherlands. As well as the general conception of suchkermis subjects, Vinckboons and other artists took from Bruegel "such stylistic devices as the bird's-eye perspective, ornamentalised vegetation, bright palette, and stocky, odious figures."[56] Forty years after their deaths, and over a century after Bruegel's,Jan Steen (1626–79) continued to show a particular interest in Bruegelian treatments.[28]
The critical treatment of Bruegel as essentially an artist of comic peasant scenes persisted until the late 19th century, even after his best paintings became widely visible as royal and aristocratic collections were turned into museums. This had been partly explicable when his work was mainly known from copies, prints, and reproductions.[13] Even Henri Hymans, whose work of 1890/1891 was the first important contribution to modern Bruegel scholarship, could describe him thus: "His field of enquiry is certainly not of the most extensive; his ambition, too, is modest. He confines himself to a knowledge of mankind and the most immediate objects", a line no modern scholar is likely to take.[13] As his landscape paintings, in good colour reproduction, have become his best-loved works, so his importance in the history oflandscape art has become understood.[13]
There are about forty generally accepted surviving paintings, twelve of which are in theKunsthistorisches Museum inVienna.[57] Others are known to have been lost, including what, according to van Mander, Bruegel himself thought his best work, "a picture in which Truth triumphs".[58]
Bruegel only etched one plate himself,The Rabbit Hunt, but designed some forty prints, bothengravings andetchings, mostly for theCock publishing house. As discussed above, about sixty-one drawings are now recognised as authentic, mostly designs for prints or landscapes.
A Pig Has to Go in a Sty (1557), Bruegel's earliest genre scene, private collection
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, probably 1550s, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels – Note: Now seen as a copy of a lost authentic Bruegel painting[59]
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Seamus Heaney refers to Brueghel in his poem "The Seed Cutters".[63] David Jones alludes to the paintingThe Blind Leading the Blind in his World War One prose-poemIn Parenthesis: "the stumbling dark of the blind, that Breughel knew about – ditch circumscribed".
Michael Frayn's novelHeadlong, imagines a lost panel from the 1565Months series resurfacing unrecognised, which triggers a conflict between an art (and money) lover and the boor who possesses it. Much thought is spent on Bruegel's secret motives for painting it.
In the foreword to his novelThe Folly of the World, authorJesse Bullington explains that Bruegel's paintingNetherlandish Proverbs inspired the title and also the plot to some extent. Various sections are introduced with a proverb depicted in the painting that alludes to a plot element.
Russian film directorAndrei Tarkovsky refers to Bruegel's paintings in his films several times, notably inSolaris (1972) andThe Mirror (1975).
DirectorLars von Trier also uses Bruegel's paintings in his filmMelancholia (2011). This was used as a reference to Tarkovsky'sSolaris, a movie with related themes.
His 1564 paintingThe Procession to Calvary inspired the 2011 Polish-Swedish film co-productionThe Mill and the Cross, in which Bruegel is played byRutger Hauer. Bruegel's paintings in theKunsthistorisches Museum are featured in the 2012 film,Museum Hours, where his work is discussed in conversations between a security guard at the museum and a visitor from Montreal who is visiting a hospitalised relative, and takes time off between hospital visits to visit the museum. Some scenes feature tour guides who present their analysis and interpretation of Bruegel's paintings.
The album cover ofFleet Foxes' debut self-titled LP features Bruegel's 1559 masterpieceNetherlandish Proverbs, a decision made by vocalist/guitarist Robin Pecknold. In an interview withMojo, Pecknold noted he drew inspiration from the painting after seeing it in a book, and viewed it as an appropriate allegory to the album's dense – but unified – sound.[64] Pecknold further added that theGemäldegalerie, which houses the painting, was thrilled to have the work featured on a contemporary record. The cover claimed the Best Art Vinyl Award 2008, an annual award organized by Artvinyl.com.[65]
^Grove;van Mander's Bruegel biography in Dutch; Wied, 15–18 gives a full English translation. Guicciardini was an Italian who had lived in Antwerp since at least 1542, and probably knew Bruegel, which Van Mander, born in 1648 on theother side of Flanders, is most unlikely to have done.
^"den welcken is geboren niet wijt van Breda, op een Dorp geheeten Brueghel, welcks naem hy met hem ghedraghen heeft, en zijn naecomelinghen ghelaten."
^Grove: "none of the three Flemish villages of that name is close to Breda".; Wied, 18, says two of the villages (Groot Bruegel and Cleyn Bruegel) are close toBree, Belgium, which is "Breda" in Latin, perhaps causing Van Mander confusion.Son en Breugel still has supporters but is 34 miles from Breda, though just outsideEindhoven – see[1] andRKD.
^This is according to Van Mander; although there is no documentation and little evident stylistic influence from his future father-in-law, modern scholars generally accept this.
^Orenstein, 266–267, and following catalogue pages; Grove
^Snyder, 502; Orenstein, 96–97 for one agreed exception; seethis British Museum page for another drawing of Roman ruins, perhaps the Colosseum, recently attributed to Bruegel
^abStokstad, Cothren, Marilyn, Michael (2010).Art History- Fourteenth to Seventeenth Century Art.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Mayor, A. Hyatt (1971).Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 426.
^Orenstein, vii gives the total; fifty-four were in the exhibition and are catalogued, and most others illustrated. These included all those from the largest collections, Berlin (10), London (8) and Vienna (6). Sellink in 2012 lists 70.
^Orenstein, 266–267, and following catalogue pages for individual works.
^Orenstein, 276–277, and following catalogue pages for individual works.
^Jean Bastiaensen, "De verloving van Pieter Bruegel de Oude. Nieuw licht op de Antwerpse verankering",Openbaar Kunstbezit Vlaanderen, 51 (2013), no. 1: 26–27.
^Grove; Manfred Sellink in 2012 listed forty paintings, seventy drawings and seventy-five prints, the latter slightly higher numbers than other sources.
^(Het journaal 1–11/11/09)."deredactie.be". Vrtnieuws.net. Archived fromthe original on 19 October 2007. Retrieved12 November 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
"Grove": Wied, Alexander and Van Miegroet, Hans J. "Bruegel."Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed 2 February 2017,subscription required
Harbison, Craig.The Art of the Northern Renaissance, 1995, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,ISBN0297835122
Hugh Honour and John Fleming,A World History of Art, 1st edn. 1982 (many later editions), Macmillan, London, page refs to 1984 Macmillan 1st edn. paperback.ISBN0333371852
Silver, Larry,Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market, 2006, University of Pennsylvania Press,ISBN0812222113, 9780812222111,Google Books
Joseph Leo Koerner,Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts), 2016, Princeton
Jos Koldeweij; Matthijs Ilsink,Hieronymus Bosch: Visions of Genius, 2016, Yale
Sellink, Manfred,Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints, 2007
Meganck, Tine LukPieter Bruegel the Elder: Fall of the Rebel Angels: Art, Knowledge and Politics on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt, 2014, Milan, Silvana Editoriale
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