Pieter Brueghel The Younger

PIETER BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER

Brussels 1564/5 - 1637/8 Antwerp

Pieter Brueghel the Younger was the son of the celebrated painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525/30-1569) and elder brother of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Born in 1564/5 in Brussels, he was probably, like Jan, trained by his grandmother Mayken Verhulst, a miniature and watercolour painter. According to van Mander, he was also a pupil of Gillis van Coninxloo III. Brueghel was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1584/5. On 5th November 1588 he married Elizabeth Godelet, with whom he had seven children. Of the nine pupils produced by his workshop from 1588 to 1626, the still life and animal painter Frans Snyders and Gonzales Coques, the genre painter, are worthy of note.

Throughout his life Pieter II lived in financially straitened circumstances. He possessed neither his own house nor did he undertake the obligatory educational journey to Italy from which his brother Jan benefited. In 1597, he owed several months’ rent. Pieter seems never to have left Antwerp. He died there in 1637/38, at the advanced age of seventy-three.

Brueghel however ran a thriving atelier and his copies and imitations of his father’s most famous compositions, as well as the lively independent scenes developed later in his career, were much in demand. He was noted for detailed scenes of peasant life, landscapes and religious subjects, usually with a large number of figures. Marriage and fair scenes give an amusing interpretation of contemporary Flemish rural customs, painted for the delight of townsfolk. Through Pieter II, his father’s compositions and reputation were kept alive; some works by Pieter I are now only known through his son’s copies. Pieter II’s son Pieter III (1589-c.1640) became a painter in 1608 and followed in the tradition of his father’s studio.

The work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger is represented in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the Louvre, Paris; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.