Pieter Bruegel the Elder

c.1525-1569
Dutch and Flemish Renaissance

For this presentation you will need the available reproductions and supplemental boards in the vertical
art storage rack to the right of the cabinet.

• The Harvesters (1565) (Landscape and genre painting)

• Children’s Games (1560) (Genre painting)

In the black cabinet you will find a white binder with 8.5 x 11 prints of additional genre paintings, a
copy of the current presentation and some additional materials that have been collected over the years.

In the plastic bin you will find some small paintbrushes and a tube of oil paint, book Pieter Bruegel
(Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists), and 23 8.5x11 laminated prints of Children’s Games.
 

Updated October 22, 2013

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Personal Information  
Name: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (pronounced Brooghel). He spelled his name Brueghel
until 1559, when he chose to remove the “h” from his name. His sons put the “h”
back in the name.
Nationality: Dutch
Born: c. 1525 in Bree, Duchy of Brabant, Habsburg Netherlands (now Belgium)
Died: September 9, 1569 (age 44)
Lived: He lived in Antwerp in the early 1550’s, and then in Rome, and finally returned to
Antwerp where he worked until his death in 1569.
Family: He was married and had two sons who were both painters; Pieter Bruegel the
Younger, and Jan Bruegel the Elder. Because their father taught them how to paint,
their paintings are often confused with his.

Professional Information
Type of artist: Pieter Bruegel was a painter and printmaker from the Netherlands and painted
during the Renaissance over 500 years ago. He is known for his landscapes and
peasant scenes, which were very unusual things to paint for this time period.
Considered the greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century he is credited with
being the first to paint scenes from daily life. These types of painting are known as
Genre (pronounced shawn-rah) paintings. He was also different from other artists
of his time because he would focus his artwork on the beauty and appeal of the
landscape in his paintings, rather than using landscape as background support for
the main subject of the painting.

Ask: They mention “peasant scenes”. Can anyone guess what a peasant is?
Peasants were poor people. They had few possessions, did not have an education,
and worked as farmers, builders and at hard labor activities like digging.

Pieter Bruegel’s nickname was 'Peasant Bruegel' or 'Bruegel the Peasant' because
they say he would dress up like a peasant in order to mingle at weddings and other
celebrations. He would see with his own eyes all of the details in the things that he
would end up painting. He painted human behavior truthfully, even if people were
acting strangely or silly. He did not do this to be mean and critical, but rather he
seemed to be saying: This is just how life really is.

Style/Technique: Bruegel wanted to tell stories with his paintings. This is called Narrative painting.
When you look at his work you can see many different things going on in them, all
at the same time. This is what happens in real life, which makes it a very
naturalistic way of painting, and because he liked to paint this way it meant that he
needed to pay close attention to details, observing the things around him and then
carefully painting them into his work.

 
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He created works in three main categories:

1. Genre scenes (mainly peasant life)
2. Landscapes
3. Religious scenes

Bruegel painted in oil, often on wood, and depending on how thickly oil is painted,
it would take up to two weeks to dry.

Show: Tube of oil paint. This is what artists use today when they paint with oil.

To allow him to paint such precise detail to which he is known, Bruegel used very
thin brushes. It is said that he sometimes used a brush made of only three cat
whiskers.

Show: Smallest brush and tell the children that Bruegel’s paintbrush was even
smaller than that.

Although many of Bruegel’s paintings are of outdoor scenes he typically did not
paint outside. He would sketch the scene outdoors and then return to his studio
where he would apply the oil paint to the canvas.

Artist Background
Bruegel was a student of another famous artist (Pieter Coecke van Aelst) who was teaching him to be
the best artist he could be. These types of students are known as Apprentices. He learned painting and
printmaking from his teacher and later spent time in France and Italy. Next he went to Antwerp in the
Netherlands where he was accepted as a member, and called a Master, in the painter's guild. A painter’s
guild is a group of artists who get together and make sure that all members work as a team in their town.
Guild members create and follow important rules to do their job as best they can.

Elements of Art

Line and Color are used in all artwork.

Line is a way to create shapes and suggest movement in artwork. In both paintings we will see
activities going on in small groups and see how they fit into their surroundings. Look for how lines are
used to express emotion and action. Look for lines that lead your eye from one part of the painting to
another.

Colors are used to evoke feelings from people and help make a painting look realistic. Observe how the
artist uses color to make you feel a certain way about what is going on in the painting.

 
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Featured Artwork
The Harvesters (1565)
(Landscape and Genre, oil on wood)

Ask: What time of the year do you think this is? How does the artist create the impression of heat?

Notice the color of the painting – heavily yellow, gold, and dark green. You can feel how hot it must be
just by looking at it. The sky also looks hazy and there appears to be no wind to relieve the heat of
August.

Ask: If you wanted to paint “summer” what colors would you use? If you wanted to paint “winter”
what colors would you use? Why would you pick those colors?

Ask: Who knows what a landscape is? Why do you think that? (Outside, nature, trees, sky?).

This painting is a combination of genre painting and landscape painting; it is part of Bruegel’s famous
“seasonal series”. There may be people painted into this picture but they are not the primary focus of
the painting. In fact, these paintings were some of the first landscape paintings that glorified the

 
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landscape as the subject and used the life and manners of peasants to add to the realism of the art. As
the title suggests, this landscape painting depicts peasants who are harvesting the grain.

Ask: Do you think of this as a narrow view of the land (like looking through a small window) or a wide
view of the land?

This broad type of view is called panorama. The artist uses panorama to get as many details into the
painting as he can. This makes the people in the painting look smaller in comparison to everything
around them. It shows how small humans are in comparison to nature.

Ask: By looking at this painting where does it look like the artist is standing? He appears to be looking
down on the field.

This is called perspective and this high view perspective that Bruegel used in this painting is unusual. It
is as if the viewer is on a hill or is a bird flying in the sky or a person sitting high in a tree overlooking
the scene below. Notice also how the figures in the foreground are larger and have more detail than the
scenes in the distance. Back along the horizon everything is smaller and has less detail, and starts to
fade away. By doing this an artist can show how close and how far away things are and give the person
looking at the painting an idea of how big the space is.

Ask: What time of the day do you think this is? It is lunchtime. What are the people doing?

These workers are in the middle of their day’s work. Some are resting, others eating, while still others
continue to perform the various tasks of harvesting – cutting the wheat, bundling the wheat or carrying
the bundles to the hay wagon. These are the some of the many activities that Bruegel included in this
painting and are examples of the extreme detail he is known for.

Ask: Does it look like there is any wind? Do you know why not?
If it were windy what kinds of lines would you expect to see? The wheat would be bent and the leaves
on the tree would be blown in the same direction.

Take a look at the line that edges the cut wheat from the wheat that is still standing. It leads your eye up
to the forest in the background where another line curves around and to the left. That is a path through
the wheat. This path leads your eye into the distance and you can’t help but continue to follow these
lines from one point in the painting to the next. This is something artists make use of and they can do it
in so many ways.

Ask: What other lines do you see in this painting? Tree. Wheat laying down, groves of trees, fields of
green grass.

The Harvesters was one of 12 paintings Bruegel was hired to do. In 1565 a wealthy patron in Antwerp
paid him to paint a number of paintings to represent for each month of the year. Today, only five of
these paintings survive. In these paintings, Pieter Bruegel wanted to capture perfectly the changing
conditions of the various seasons and he did a very good job.

Show: 8.5x11 prints in binder of other seasonal paintings by Bruegel:

 
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Hunters In The Snow (January),

The Gloomy Day) (March),
Haymaking (June),
Return of the Herd (November)

Show: Pick one or two of these smaller prints that you think are interesting

Ask:
What do you think of the colors Bruegel chose for these paintings?
How do you feel when you look at these paintings?
Are the people wearing the right clothing for that time of the year?
What do you wear during that time of year?

Children’s Games (1560)

(Genre, Oil on wood)

Show (optional): If you want, you may choose to pass out the 8.5 x 11 laminated prints of this painting
as a supplement to the large-scale reproduction.

When Bruegel was

alive there were no
newspapers or
television, so people
looked at his paintings
for entertainment and
to learn things.
Described as an
encyclopedia of
Flemish children’s
games, this painting is
another example of
Bruegel’s genre
painting and is a
perfect example of the
fine detail for which
Bruegel is famous.

The subject is a
Flemish village in
which hundreds of children (and some adults) are playing games of the period. Some games are
familiar and others are very unfamiliar.

Ask: How many games can you see in this painting? There is said to more than 80 games represented
in this painting with over 250 kids involved.

 
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Swimming Playing in the sand Pretend baptism

Climbing Trees Balancing Mud pies
Playing with masks / dressing up Stilts Riding horse
Bowling Follow the Leader Dueling on piggyback
King of the Castle Wrestling Gymnastics
Spinning tops Piñata Pea Shooter
Riding pretend horses Marbles Crafts
Headstands Climbing Playing with hoops
Wedding procession Swinging on the rail Riding Barrels
Magic Tag Leapfrog
Charades Religious processions Hide and Seek
Twirling Spinning disc on a stick Blowing the jug
Letting string blow in the wind Blind Man’s bluff Looking at Bugs
Jousting Playing dolls
Fishing Jacks

Ask: How do you think the children in this painting feel? Who do you think the kids are that are
playing together? Are they friends/cousins/neighbors?

Ask: What is the occasion of all these games? Is it a holiday? Where would we ever see this many
children playing together?

Ask: If you were in the painting, where would you be? What game would you be playing?

Let’s look at what these children are doing:

Some are team games

(tug o' war on
Some are rough and
'horseback')--diagonal
Some are gentle and bullying (hair
Some are played alone lines
caring (a wedding pulling)--notice
(a girl with her doll)--
game)--curved lines of diagonal arms and more curved lines
bending bodies to lines used for angry
show gentleness mouth and gritting
teeth!

 
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Some are skillful

(jacks) Some are reckless
Some are competitive Some are imaginative (disturbing a bee-hive)--
(see-saw on a barrel)   (horse racing) diagonal stick

Ask: Do you see more ways the artist used lines to lead your eye around the painting? How about the
edge of the building on the left and the fence? Where does that line point? What about the bench to the
bottom right? Those lines form a triangle with the top pointing up to the nearly centered building.

You can also see how the children’s playing bodies make curvy lines throughout the painting – these
curves show just how much activity is going on everywhere. And each activity is a different scene,
almost like its own painting. Together these scenes make up one entire painting.

Ask: If Bruegel were to paint this painting today, how would it be different?

Activities
Read:
You may choose to read from the included book Pieter Bruegel (Getting to Know the World's Greatest
Artists).

Try at Home:
When you go out to the store with your parents, or are with your family, or on the playground with your
friends, or at a sporting event (anywhere!) take a little time to watch what is happening around you.
Think about the whole room or area as if it were to be a painting. These small scenes going on in front
of you are making up your story in a way that is natural. At home try and remember these little scenes
and draw or paint them all together on a piece of paper.

Resources
http://vimeo.com/13496550#
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/brue/hd_brue.htm
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder
http://artsmarts4kids.blogspot.com/2008/06/pieter-bruegel-elder.html

 
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