Works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Hunters tramping home through snow, harvesters eating in a wheat field: Pieter Bruegel the Elder was among the first to give peasant life and landscape the size of a large painting.

Back from Italy, Bruegel settled in Antwerp in 1555 and drew designs for prints, mostly for the publisher Hieronymus Cock. The one plate he etched himself is The Rabbit Hunt of 1560, where a man aims a crossbow at rabbits while a spearman creeps up behind him. Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a drawing of 1556, shows a beached fish slit open with a huge knife, spilling smaller fish with yet smaller fish in their mouths. Bruegel signed it, but Cock put Hieronymus Bosch's name on the print.

Painting became his main medium at the end of the 1550s. Children's Games, from 1560, looks down on a square crowded with small figures, each group busy with its own game, rolling hoops or riding a barrel. In the 1560s the crowds gave way to a few large figures. In The Peasant Wedding two men carry bowls on a board through a packed room, pipers play, and a child in a red cap eats from a plate on the floor.

In 1565 the Antwerp banker Niclaes Jonghelinck ordered paintings of the months, of which five survive. The Hunters in the Snow brings hunters and dogs over a hill past bare trees, with skaters on the frozen ponds below and jagged peaks far off. Most works below are paintings and drawings, and religious and allegorical subjects come up most; apart from the one he etched, the prints were cut by other hands.

Sources: Wikipedia, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Albertina, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portrait: Pieter Brueghel the Elder.