Walter S. Gibson: Bruegel

Pieter Bruegel the Elder has enjoyed both admiration and popularity for four hundred years. Yet although his pictures have become a familiar part of our lives, the artist himself remains a shadowy and misunderstood figure. In a volume which will widen the understanding and enhance the enjoyment of all Bruegel's many admirers, Walter Gibson opens up the sixteenth-century world in which the artist lived. He analyses the different strands of Bruegel's inspiration, examines his works, and considers his influence on later artists. Dispelling the notion of Bruegel the simpleton peasant, the author shows us Bruegel the cultivated artist, satisfying an urban society's pleasure in moralizing tales and proverbs, rooted in the rich, bourgeois, brilliant Antwerp of the Flemish Renaissance.