James Baquet

    Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) was the son of the Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569), famed for his paintings of landscapes containing a number of peasants going about their everyday tasks (known as “genre paintings”). And Jan the Elder was also the father of Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678), who, like his father, was known for highly detailed landscapes and allegorical scenes. To make things more confusing, Jan the Elder had an elder brother, Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564-1638), who was also a painter.

    In addition to these, at least four other Brueghels left their marks in the art world: Ambrosius Brueghel (1617-1675), another son of Jan the Elder; and Jan Peeter Brueghel (1628-1680), Abraham Bruegel (1631-1680), and Jan Baptist Brueghel (1670-1710), his grandsons via Jan the Younger.

    Incidentally, the family is variously called “Brueghel” or “Bruegel,” both pronounced “BROY-guhl” in English. From the 1540s they were centered mainly in Antwerp, now in Belgium but then essentially Dutch, though Jan the Elder was born and spent his early years in nearby Brussels.

    The elder Jan was also quite famous for his still lifes, elaborate paintings of flowers and other table-top subjects, which earned him such nicknames as “Flower Brueghel” and “Paradise Brueghel.” (He was also called “Velvet Brueghel” for the effect his colors had.) As a young man he traveled in Italy, where a cardinal in Rome became his patron. He moved on to Milan, where he attained patronage from Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who supported his work for the rest of his life.

    Returning to Antwerp in 1596, he joined an artists’ guild and was associated with the court in the capital of Brussels. He also collaborated on around 25 paintings with the famous Peter Paul Rubens. Usually, one of the two would paint a landscape, and the other would fill in the figures in it. He collaborated with other painters as well.

    Jan Brueghel the Elder and three of his children died in Antwerp during a cholera epidemic.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. one who supports the work of an artist

    2. a disease one can get from infected water

    3. by the way

    4. people who work on the land, low-class farmers

    5. second-highest official in the Catholic Church

    6. complicated, highly detailed

    7. telling a story, symbolic

    8. worked together with

    9. disease with a large number of cases

    10. able to be arranged in a small space