(Dutch pronunciation:c. 1525 - 9 September 1569) was a Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (Genre Painting). He is sometimes referred to as "Peasant Bruegel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which "Bruegel" is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and started signing his paintings as Bruegel. There are records that he was born in Breda, Netherlands, but it is uncertain whether the Dutch town of Breda or the Belgian town of Bree, called Breda in Latin, is meant. He was an apprentice of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayken he later married. He spent some time in France and Italy, and then went to Antwerp, where in 1551 he was accepted as a master in the painter's guild. He traveled to Italy soon after, and then returned to Antwerp before settling in Brussels permanently 10 years later. He received the nickname 'Peasant Bruegel' or 'Bruegel the Peasant' for his alleged practice of dressing up like a peasant in order to mingle at weddings and other celebrations, thereby gaining inspiration and authentic details for his genre paintings. He died in Brussels on 9 September 1569 and was buried in the Kapellekerk. He was the father of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Both became painters, but as they were very young children when their father died, it is believed neither received any training from him.   Related Paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder :. | The Corn Harvest | Christ Carrying the Cross | The Fall of the Rebel Angels | Children's Games | Magpie on the Gallow |
Related Artists:
CRETI, Donato
Italian painter, Bolognese school (b. 1671, Bologna, d. 1749, Bologna) Italian painter and draughtsman. His individual and poetic art represents, with that of Marcantonio Franceschini, the last significant expression of the classical-idealist strain in Bolognese painting. His activity was almost wholly confined to Bologna, where he painted decorative frescoes, altarpieces and easel pictures for private collectors. Two qualities are paramount: a perfected finesse of handling and poetic suggestiveness of situation and mood. He sought the ideal beauty of the individual figure and was thus at his best in meditative pictures with few figures; his subjects combine grace of form and precision of contour with flesh that attains the surface delicacy of porcelain and colours that have a mineral-like refulgence.
Woolner, Thomas
1825 - 1892,English sculptor and poet. He ranks with John Henry Foley as the leading sculptor of mid-Victorian England. He trained with William Behnes and in 1842 enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy, London. In 1844 he exhibited at Westminster Hall, London, a life-size plaster group, the Death of Boadicea (destr.), in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain sculptural commissions for the Houses of Parliament. His earliest important surviving work is the statuette of Puck (plaster, 1845-7; C. G. Woolner priv. col.), which was admired by William Holman Hunt and helped to secure Woolner's admission in 1848 to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The work's Shakespearean theme and lifelike execution, stressing Puck's humorous malice rather than traditional ideal beauty, made it highly appealing. Although eclipsed by Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Woolner was an important figure in the Brotherhood. He contributed poetry to its journal, The Germ (1850), and his work was committed to truthfulness to nature more consistently than that of any other Pre-Raphaelite, except for Hunt. This is evident in Woolner's monument to William Wordsworth (marble, 1851; St Oswald, Grasmere, Cumbria).
Samuel Hieronymous Grimm
Swiss Painter, 1733-1794 Swiss painter and draughtsman, active in England. He studied in Berne under Johann Ludwig Aberli and became established as a painter of topographical views in oil and watercolour. His early surviving works (e.g. River Landscape and Landscape with Chasseurs; Basle, priv. col.) are principally tinted drawings of landscapes and alpine scenery, with scenes of rustic life in the foreground; they display his characteristically charming and informal style. He also produced many decorative book illustrations: the frontispiece and plates to Friedrich von Hagedorn's Poetische Werke (1769-72) are among his finest. By 1764 Grimm had abandoned oils and was painting only in watercolour. From 1765 to 1768 he travelled and painted in France; he then moved to England,