Collection: Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) was the Flemish painter who put peasants at the centre of his pictures: their feasts, their work in the fields, their winters. He is called the Elder to tell him apart from his son Pieter, also a painter. In 1565 he painted for a wealthy Antwerp merchant a series of pictures on the times of the year: it includes the Hunters in the Snow, now in Vienna, and The Harvesters, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

In this collection you will find the Hunters in the Snow, The Harvesters and Netherlandish Proverbs, the painting in which more than a hundred sayings become scenes of everyday life, printed on handmade Amalfi paper.

Before him, monsters and crowds had been painted by Hieronymus Bosch, the painter he was compared to; three centuries later, peasants at work return in the paintings of Camille Pissarro.