Tim Marlow TV - Wendy Beckett TV - E H Gombrich - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Simon Schama TV -
Bruegel has long been hailed as one of the leading painters of Western art. Tim Marlow at the Courtauld 2/3
In northern Europe another less heroic but equally dramatic vision was being forged. Pieter Bruegel’s world is filed with the mundane and the macabre. Great Artists with Tim Marlow s1e7: Bruegel, Sky Arts 2003
His interest in the everyday was epic in itself. ibid.
He deliberately rejected the Italian style. ibid.
Cheaper than oil paintings, prints had a wider market ... and gave him a steady source of income. ibid.
Bruegel’s fame and success continued to grow in Antwerp. ibid.
The Massacre of the Innocents is a Biblical story set in a contemporary Flemish village. ibid.
The Peasant Wedding Feast ... We see individual faces ... People are eating; they are eating voraciously. ibid.
On his deathbed in order to protect his family he ordered his wife to destroy any paintings in the house which might be politically dangerous. Still only in his early forties Bruegel died in 1569. The painter’s popularity continued to grow after his death. ibid.
Bruegel founded a whole tradition of low-life paintings in the Netherlands. ibid.
Hunters in the Snow [Bruegel] remains immensely popular with political cartoonists. Sister Wendy Beckett, BBC
The greatest of the Flemish sixteenth-century masters of genre was Pieter Bruegel the Elder. We know little of his life except that he had been to Italy, like so many northern artists of his time, and that he lived and worked in Antwerp and Brussels, where he painted most of his pictures in the 1560s, the decade in which the stern Duke of Alva arrived in the Netherlands. E H Gombrich, The Story of Art
Bruegel’s work was popular ... warmth and empathy to these people. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The High Art of the Low Countries: Dream of Plenty, BBC 2013
In 1565 the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel painted a set of landscapes which reinvented that traditional medieval cycle – the labours of the months. Simon Schama, Civilisations III: Picturing Paradise, BBC 2018