Pictures of Brueghel the Elder. Life and work of the artist

This man was dissatisfied with the policy of the authorities and the permissiveness of the church, but he remained silent all his life. For him spoke his paintings. After him there were no written documents left, but the school of painting created by him remained. He created his masterpieces and forged strangers. The name of one of the most mysterious artists of the past is Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Genius, about which almost nothing is known

Even the exact date of his birth is unknown. To this day only fragmentary information has reached that in the Netherlands province of Breda in 1525 a child was born who was destined to enter the history of world painting under the name of Peter Brueghel the Elder. However, he will also have a nickname - "Muzhitsky". His whole life met the three documents that had come down to us. These are records of Bruegel's admission to the Guild of Painters of the City of Antwerp, of the registration of marriage and summing up the record of death and burial.

That's all. The greatest artist of his time, he left no self-portrait, no portraits of his wife and children. There are reasons to believe that on some of his paintings the painter painted himself, giving individual characters their own traits. However, the paintings of Brueghel the Elder keep their secret. True, his portraits, engraved by contemporaries, remained, but they are not similar to each other, and therefore are not convincing.

It all started with graphics

But not everything is hidden from us by time. It is known that at the beginning of his journey Bruegel was engaged in graphics. This art was taught by a court painter, recognized then master Peter Cook van Aalst. For a young man it was a great success to get into the workshop of such a venerable master. His talent quickly developed, and soon he already got a profitable job from the publisher of the engravings of Hieronymus Kok.

Then his life path is finally determined - he is a professional artist. Gradually, the young artist becomes cramped within the graphics, and he begins to try his hand at painting.

Entry to the Guild of Artists

Pictures of Brueghel the Elder opened the way to the Guild of Artists. The event is very important, since without official status it was impossible to count on receiving profitable orders, and in the future - places at court.

Entering the guild, Peter Bruegel the Elder first saw the pictures of his great predecessor, Hieronymus Bosch. They shocked his imagination. Sufficiently possessing by that time technical skills, he created a whole series of canvases executed in the manner of his idol. For an inexperienced glance, the paintings of Brueghel the Elder differed little from Bosch's paintings.

Paintings with someone else's signature

And here there was an unpleasant incident. The fact is that vanity has always been one of the human vices, and some customers bought paintings from Bruegel, provided that he will put on them not his signature, but the signature of some eminent master. The young artist fulfilled their requests. But once there was a scandal: an engraving on the plot of one of his paintings was sold with the signature of Hieronymus Bosch as a script, for a lot of money. With incredible difficulty managed to avoid serious trouble.

A trip to Italy and the choice of a creative way

When Brueghel was 25 years old, he traveled to Italy. I must say that this country has always been a kind of Mecca for artists. Three hundred years later, Karl Bryullov writes that the very air of Italy is full of inspiration. Here the young painter saw landscapes, which later came to life on his canvases. On his return from the trip, he lived in Antwerp, and then in Brussels.

By this time, the artist Brueghel the Elder was already quite determined as a creative individuality. The fact is that in the middle of the 16th century, the painting of the Netherlands was dominated by the direction of "novelists", that is, artists who based their work on the style of Italian Mannerism. Unlike his compatriots, he remained faithful to the traditions of the Old-Nordern School.

Symbolism in the artist's work

The work of Bruegel the Elder combines elements of reality and fantasy. Like many progressive people of his time, he was dissatisfied with the arbitrariness of the authorities and the church in the country, but he was silent, since everyone who ventured to raise his voice ventured to be at the stake. The sentences were immediately passed. His contemporaries considered him "dumb." But the artist has his own weapon - an appeal to people through the symbols embodied in his paintings. These were some kind of encrypted messages. The paintings of Brueghel the Elder are "Aesopian language" in painting. Not everyone understood their meaning, but for those to whom they were meant, this language was more eloquent than words.

Peter Bruegel the Elder finished his life on September 15, 1569, reaching unprecedented heights of creativity and influencing the development of all subsequent world painting. His ashes received eternal rest in the Church of the Virgin in Brussels. He was one of the first to show the lives of ordinary people on his canvases and for this he began to be called a "muzhik" artist. The article presents 4 reproductions from his paintings: "Artist and connoisseur" (it is possible that she conveys the portrait features of the author), "The Tower of Babel", "Peasant Wedding" and "Return of Hunters".