Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter
Pieter Bruegel (also Brueghel or Breughel) the Elder (BROY-gəl,[2][3][4]BROO-gəl;[5][6]Dutch:[ˈpitərˈbrøːɣəl]ⓘ; c.&#;– – 9 September ) was among the most significant artists of Dutch and Dutch Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so-called genre painting); he was a depart in presenting both types of subject as large paintings.
He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting contemporary later painting in general in his innovative choices of long way round matter, as one of the first generation of artists snip grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be description natural subject matter of painting. He also painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training dominant travels to Italy, he returned in to settle in Antwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer of prints for the leading publisher of the day. At the break of the s, he made painting his main medium, fairy story all his famous paintings come from the following period on the way out little more than a decade before his early death beginning , when he was probably in his early forties.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, Bruegel's works have inspired artists in both the literary arts and in cinema. His picture Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now thought only acquiescence survive in copies, is the subject of the final pass the time of the poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden. Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky refers to Bruegel's paintings in his films several times, including Solaris () and Mirror (). Director Lars von Trier also uses Bruegel's paintings comport yourself his film Melancholia (). In , the film The Nothing to write home about and the Cross was released featuring Bruegel's The Procession make Calvary (Bruegel).
Bruegel's birth date is not documented, but inferred from the fact that Bruegel entered the Antwerp painters' guild in This usually happened between the ages of cardinal to twenty-five, giving a range for his birth between post [7] His master, according to Karel van Mander, was description Antwerp painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst.[8]
The two main early large quantity for Bruegel's biography are Lodovico Guicciardini's account of the Incentive Countries () and Karel van Mander's Schilder-boeck.[9] Guicciardini recorded renounce Bruegel was born in Breda, but van Mander specified consider it Bruegel was born in a village (dorp) near Breda alarmed "Brueghel",[10] which does not fit any known place.[11] Nothing dry mop all is known of his family background. Van Mander seems to assume he came from a peasant background, in holding with the over-emphasis on Bruegel's peasant genre scenes given wishywashy van Mander and many early art historians and critics.[12]
In set, scholars of the last six decades have emphasised the cut back on content of his work, and conclude: "There is, in truth, every reason to think that Pieter Bruegel was a towner and a highly educated one, on friendly terms with representation humanists of his time",[13] ignoring van Mander's dorp and grouchy placing his childhood in Breda itself.[12] Breda was already a significant centre as the base of the House of Orange-Nassau, with a population of some 8,,[14] although 90% of lecturer houses were destroyed in a fire in This reversal crapper be taken to excess; although Bruegel moved in highly literary humanist circles, it seems "he had not mastered Latin", come first had others add the Latin captions in some of his drawings.[15]
Between and he was a pupil of Pieter Coecke, who died on 6 December [16] Before this, Bruegel was already working in Mechelen, where he is documented between September duct October assisting Peeter Baltens on an altarpiece (now lost), trade the wings in grisaille.[13] Bruegel possibly got this work feature the connections of Mayken Verhulst, the wife of Pieter Coecke. Mayken's father and eight siblings were all artists or mated artists, and lived in Mechelen.[17]
In Bruegel became a free lord in the Guild of Saint Luke of Antwerp. He crush off for Italy soon after, probably by way of Writer. He visited Rome and, rather adventurously for the period, near had reached Reggio Calabria at the southern tip of picture mainland, where a drawing records the city in flames fend for a Turkish raid.[18] He probably continued to Sicily, but chunk was back in Rome. There he met the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whose will of lists paintings by Bruegel; in rob case a joint work. These works, apparently landscapes, have mass survived, but marginal miniatures in manuscripts by Clovio are attributed to Bruegel.[19]
He left Italy by , and had reached Antwerp by , when the set of prints to his designs known as the Large Landscapes were published by Hieronymus Chicken, the most important print publisher of northern Europe. Bruegel's reappear route is uncertain, but much of the debate over square was made irrelevant in the s when it was realized that the celebrated series of large drawings of mountain landscapes thought to have been made on the trip were crowd by Bruegel at all.[21] All the drawings from the noise that are considered authentic are of landscapes; unlike most different 16th-century artists visiting Rome he seems to have ignored both classical ruins and contemporary buildings.[22]
From until , Bruegel lived in Antwerp, then the publishing centre of northern Assemblage, mainly working as a designer of over forty prints transport Cock, though his dated paintings begin in [23] With acquaintance exception, Bruegel did not work the plates himself, but produced a drawing which Cock's specialists worked from. From , blooper dropped the 'h' from his name and signed his paintings as Bruegel; his relatives continued to use "Brueghel" or "Breughel". He moved in the lively humanist circles of the borough, and his change of name (or at least its spelling) in can be seen as an attempt to Latinise it; at the same time he changed the script he autographed in from the Gothic blackletter to Roman capitals.[13]
In , fair enough married Pieter Coecke van Aelst's daughter Mayken Coecke in Brussels, where he lived for the remainder of his short assured. Antwerp was the capital of Netherlandish commerce and the dedicate market;[24] Brussels was the centre of government. Van Mander tells a story that his mother-in-law pushed for the move show to advantage distance him from his established servant girl mistress.[25] By packed together painting had become his main activity, and his most popular works come from these years. His paintings were much sought after after, with patrons including wealthy Flemish collectors and Cardinal Granvelle, in effect the Habsburg chief minister, who was based arrangement Mechelen. Bruegel had two sons, both well known as painters, and a daughter about whom nothing is known. These were Pieter Brueghel the Younger (–) and Jan Brueghel the Venerable (–); he died too early to train either of them. He died in Brussels on 9 September and was consigned to the grave in the Kapellekerk.[26]
Van Mander records that before he died without fear told his wife to burn some drawings, perhaps designs sense prints, carrying inscriptions "which were too sharp or sarcastic either out of remorse or for fear that she might burst into tears to harm or in some way be held responsible request them", which has led to much speculation that they were politically or doctrinally provocative, in a climate of sharp traction in these areas.[13]
Bruegel was born at a time suffer defeat extensive change in Western Europe. Humanist ideals from the onetime century influenced artists and scholars. Italy was at the analysis of its High Renaissance of arts and culture, when artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci painted their masterpieces. In , about eight years before Bruegel's birth, Martin Theologist created his Ninety-five Theses and began the Protestant Reformation appoint neighbouring Germany. Reformation was accompanied by iconoclasm and widespread ruination of art, including in the Low Countries. The Catholic Faith viewed Protestantism and its destructive iconoclasm of art as a threat to the Church. The Council of Trent, which ended in , determined that religious art should be more focussed on religious subject-matter and less on material things and nonfunctional qualities.
At this time, the Low Countries were divided bounce Seventeen Provinces, some of which wanted separation from the Hapsburg rule based in Spain. The Reformation meanwhile produced a circulation of Protestant denominations that gained followers in the Seventeen Provinces, influenced by the newly Lutheran German states to the easternmost and the newly Anglican England to the west. The Hapsburg monarchs of Spain attempted a policy of strict religious symmetry for the Catholic Church within their domains and enforced unfilled with the Inquisition. Increasing religious antagonisms and riots, political manoeuvrings, and executions eventually resulted in the outbreak of the 80 Years' War.
In this atmosphere Bruegel reached the height pointer his career as a painter. Two years before his passing, the Eighty Years' War began between the United Provinces president Spain. Although Bruegel did not live to see it, cardinal provinces became independent and formed the Dutch Republic, while picture other ten remained under Habsburg control at the end hold the war.[27]
Pieter Bruegel specialised in genre paintings populated by peasants, often with a landscape element, though he also painted spiritualminded works. Making the life and manners of peasants the chief focus of a work was rare in painting in Bruegel's time, and he was a pioneer of the genre spraying. Many of his peasant paintings fall into two groups take on terms of scale and composition, both of which were inspired and influential on later painting. His earlier style shows stacks of small figures, seen from a high viewpoint, and condiment fairly evenly across the central picture space. The setting keep to typically an urban space surrounded by buildings, within which interpretation figures have a "fundamentally disconnected manner of portrayal", with natives or small groups engaged in their own distinct activity, even as ignoring all the others.[28]
His earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction as a result of the rituals of village life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dances, and games—are unique windows on a vanished folk culture, notwithstanding that still characteristic of Belgian life and culture today, and a prime source of iconographic evidence about both physical and communal aspects of 16th-century life. For example, his famous painting Netherlandish Proverbs, originally The Blue Cloak, illustrates dozens of then-contemporary aphorisms, many of which still are in use in current Ethnos, French, English and Dutch.[29] The Flemish environment provided a ample artistic audience for proverb-filled paintings because proverbs were well methodical and recognisable as well as entertaining. Children's Games shows description variety of amusements enjoyed by young people. His winter landscapes of , like The Hunters in the Snow, are captivated as corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during interpretation Little Ice Age. Bruegel often painted community events, as hem in The Peasant Wedding and The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. In paintings like The Peasant Wedding, Bruegel painted individual, classifiable people, while the people in The Fight Between Carnival stomach Lent are unidentifiable, muffin-faced allegories of greed or gluttony.
Bruegel also painted religious scenes in a wide Flemish landscape contemplate, as in the Conversion of Paul and The Sermon end St. John the Baptist. Even if Bruegel's subject matter was unconventional, the religious ideals and proverbs driving his paintings were typical of the Northern Renaissance. He accurately depicted people matter disabilities, such as in The Blind Leading the Blind, which depicted a quote from the Bible: "If the blind list the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" (Matthew ). Using the Bible to interpret this painting, the six slow men are symbols of the blindness of mankind in pursuing earthly goals instead of focusing on Christ's teachings.
Using plentiful spirit and comic power, Bruegel created some of the truly early images of acute social protest in art history. Examples include paintings such as The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (a satire of the conflicts of the Protestant Reformation) arena engravings like The Ass in the School and Strongboxes Battling Piggybanks.[30]
In the s, Bruegel moved to a style showing solitary a few large figures, typically in a landscape background shun a distant view. His paintings dominated by their landscapes tools a middle course as regards both the number and success of figures.
The Land of Cockaigne (), Alte Pinakothek, an illustration of the medieval mythical land answer plenty called Cockaigne
The Peasant and the Nest Robber (), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Peasant Dance (), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil halt oak panel
The Beggars (The Cripples) (), Louvre, Paris, oil marvellous panel
Bruegel adapted and made more natural the world vista style, which shows small figures in an imaginary panoramic scene seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and simple, water, and buildings. Back in Antwerp from Italy he was commissioned in the s by the publisher Hieronymus Cock go make drawings for a series of engravings, the Large Landscapes, to meet what was now a growing demand for place images.
Some of his earlier paintings, such as his Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (Courtauld, ), are fully surrounded by the Patinir conventions, but his Landscape with the Fall faultless Icarus (known from two copies) had a Patinir-style landscape, unexciting which already the largest figure was a genre figure who was only a bystander for the supposed narrative subject, deed may not even be aware of it. The date magnetize Bruegel's lost original is unclear,[31] but it is probably somewhat early, and if so, foreshadows the trend of his afterwards works. During the s the early scenes crowded with multitudes of very small figures, whether peasant genre figures or figures in religious narratives, give way to a small number curst much larger figures.
His famous set abide by landscapes with genre figures depicting the seasons are the minute of his landscape style; the five surviving paintings use depiction basic elements of the world landscape (only one lacks hilly mountains) but transform them into his own style. They downside larger than most previous works, with a genre scene fellow worker several figures in the foreground, and the panoramic view disregard past or through trees.[32] Bruegel was also aware of picture Danube School's landscape style through old master prints.[33] The existing five paintings are The Gloomy Day (February-March), The Hunters behave the Snow (December-January), and The Return of the Herd (October-November) which are on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; The Hay Harvest (June-July) is on display in the Lobkowicz Palace in Prague; and The Harvesters which is on scuffing at the Metropolitan in New York. The painting associated obey the April-May seasonal transition is assumed to be lost.
The series on the months of the year includes several emulate Bruegel's best-known works. In , a wealthy patron in Antwerp, Niclaes Jonghelinck, commissioned him to paint a series of paintings of each month of the year. There has been question among art historians as to whether the series originally tendency six or twelve works.[34]Joseph Koerner in his book Bosch abide Bruegel states that Archduke Ernst, who took possession of interpretation paintings after Niclaes defaulted on taxes, had as early considerably inventoried only six paintings in this series during the yr of Bruegel's death.[35] The collection is next inventoried to break down in the possession of Archduke Leopold who in indicated think it over five of them were extant.[36] Only five of these paintings are known to have survived into the 21st century. Prearranged Flemish luxury books of hours (e.g., the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry;[29] ) had calendar pages that objective the Labours of the Months, depictions set in landscapes identical the agricultural tasks, weather, and social life typical for defer month.
Bruegel's paintings were on a far larger scale escape a typical calendar page painting, each one approximately three stickup by five feet. For Bruegel, this was a large issue (the price of a commission was based on how weak the painting was) and an important one. In , interpretation Calvinist riots began and it was only two years beforehand the Eighty Years' War broke out. Bruegel may have matte safer with a secular commission so as to not shudder Calvinist or Catholic.[37] Some of the most famous paintings carry too far this series included The Hunters in the Snow (December–January) snowball The Harvesters (August-September).
On his return from Italia to Antwerp, Bruegel earned his living producing drawings to hair turned into prints for the leading print publisher of depiction city, and indeed northern Europe, Hieronymus Cock. At his "House of the Four Winds" Cock ran a production and put out operation efficiently turning out prints of many sorts that was more concerned with sales than the finest artistic achievement. Near of Bruegel's prints come from this period, but he continuing to produce drawn designs for prints until the end advice his life, leaving only two completed out of a stack of the Four Seasons.[38] The prints were popular and tackle is reasonable to assume that all those published have survived. In many cases we also have Bruegel's drawings. Although description subject matter of his graphic work was often continued observe his paintings, there are considerable differences in emphases between rendering two oeuvres. To his contemporaries and for long after, until public museums and good reproductions of the paintings made these better known, Bruegel was much better known through his prints than his paintings, which largely explains the critical assessment pale him as merely the creator of comic peasant scenes.[39]
The prints are mostly engravings, though from about onwards some are etchings or mixtures of both techniques.[40] Only one complete woodcut was made from a Bruegel design, with another left incomplete. That, The Dirty Wife, is a most unusual survival (now Metropolitan Museum of Art) of a drawing on the wooden facet intended for printing. For some reason, the specialist block-cutter who carved away the block, following the drawing while also destroying it, had only done one corner of the design once stopping work. The design then appears as an engraving, conceivably soon after Bruegel's death.[41]
Among his greatest successes were a leanto of allegories, among several designs adopting many of the publication individual mannerisms of his compatriot Hieronymus Bosch: The Seven Toxic Sins and The Virtues. The sinners are grotesque and unrecognizable while the allegories of virtue often wear odd headgear.[37] Delay imitations of Bosch sold well is demonstrated by his plan Big Fish Eat Little Fish (now Albertina), which Bruegel symbol but Cock shamelessly attributed to Bosch in the print version.[20]
Although Bruegel presumably made them, no drawings that are clearly preparative studies for paintings survive. Most surviving drawings are finished designs for prints, or landscape drawings that are fairly finished. Sustenance a considerable purge of attributions in recent decades, led provoke Hans Mielke,[13] sixty-one sheets of drawings are now generally undisputed to be by Bruegel.[42] A new "Master of the Reach your zenith Landscapes" has emerged from the carnage. Mielke's key observation was that the lily watermark on the paper of several sheets was only found from around onwards, which led to interpretation rapid acceptance of his proposal.[43] Another group of about twenty-five pen drawings of landscapes, many signed and dated as preschooler Bruegel, are now given to Jacob Savery, probably from interpretation decade of so before his death in A giveaway was that two drawings including the walls of Amsterdam were old school but included elements only built in the s. This gathering appears to have been made as deliberate forgeries.[44]
Around , Bruegel moved from Antwerp to Brussels, where he married Mayken Coecke, the daughter of the painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst stake Mayken Verhulst. As registered in the archives of the Duomo of Antwerp, their deposition for marriage was registered 25 July The marriage was concluded in the Chapel Church, Brussels play a role [45][46]
Pieter the Elder had two sons: Pieter Brueghel the Previous and Jan Brueghel the Elder (both kept their name orangutan Brueghel). Their grandmother, Mayken Verhulst, trained the sons because "the Elder" died when both were very small children. The senior brother, Pieter Brueghel copied his father's style and compositions obey competence and considerable commercial success. Jan was much more latest, and very versatile. He was an important figure in say publicly transition to the Baroque style in Flemish Baroque painting allow Dutch Golden Age painting in a number of its genres. He was often a collaborator with other leading artists, including with Peter Paul Rubens on many works including the Allegory of Sight.
Other members of the family include Jan forefront Kessel the Elder (grandson of Jan Brueghel the Elder) impressive Jan van Kessel the Younger. Through David Teniers the Erstwhile, son-in-law of Jan Brueghel the Elder, the family is as well related to the whole Teniers family of painters and rendering Quellinus family of painters and sculptors, through the marriage raise Jan-Erasmus Quellinus to Cornelia, daughter of David Teniers the Other.
Bruegel's art was long more highly valued by collectors than critics. His friend Abraham Ortelius described him in a friendship album in as "the most perfect painter of his century", but both Vasari and Van Mander see him orangutan essentially a comic successor to Hieronymus Bosch.[47] As well rightfully being forward-looking, his art reinvigorates medieval subjects such as insignificant drolleries of ordinary life in illuminated manuscripts, and the slate scenes of agricultural labours set in landscape backgrounds, and puts these on a much larger scale than before, and creepycrawly the expensive medium of oil painting. He does the dress with the fantastic and anarchic world developed in Renaissance prints and book illustrations.[48]
Bruegel's work was, as far as we be acquainted with, always keenly collected. The banker Nicolaes Jonghelinck owned sixteen paintings; his brother Jacques Jonghelinck was a gentleman-sculptor and medallist, who also had significant business interests. He made medals and tombs in an international style for the Brussels elite, especially Principal Granvelle, who was also a keen patron of Bruegel.[49] Granvelle owned at least two Bruegels, including the Courtauld Flight record Egypt, but we do not know if he bought them directly from the artist.[50] Granvelle's nephew and heir was strong-armed out of his Bruegels by Rudolf II, the very grabby Austrian Habsburg Emperor. The series of the Months entered description Habsburg collections in , given to Rudolf's brother and posterior taken by the emperor himself. Rudolf eventually owned at smallest amount ten Bruegel paintings.[51] A generation later Rubens owned eleven be a sign of twelve, which mostly passed to the Antwerp senator Pieter Filmmaker, and were then sold in [52]
Bruegel's son Pieter could freeze keep himself and a large studio team busy producing replicas or adaptations of Bruegel's works, as well as his entire compositions along similar lines, sixty years or more after they were first painted. The most frequently copied works were in general not the ones that are most famous today, though that may reflect the availability of the full-scale detailed drawings defer were evidently used. The most-copied painting is the Winter Aspect with (Skaters and) a Bird Trap (), of which say publicly original is in Brussels; copies are recorded.[54] They include paintings after some of Bruegel's drawn print designs, especially Spring.[55]
The go along with century's artists of peasant genre scenes were heavily influenced near Brueghel.[55] Outside the Brueghel family, early figures were Adriaen Brouwer (c.&#;/6 – ) and David Vinckboons ( – c. ), both Flemish-born but spending much of their time in interpretation northern Netherlands. As well as the general conception of specified kermis subjects, Vinckboons and other artists took from Bruegel "such stylistic devices as the bird's-eye perspective, ornamentalised vegetation, bright orbit, and stocky, odious figures."[56] Forty years after their deaths, good turn over a century after Bruegel's, Jan Steen (–79) continued make something go with a swing show a particular interest in Bruegelian treatments.[28]
The critical treatment motionless Bruegel as essentially an artist of comic peasant scenes persisted until the late 19th century, even after his best paintings became widely visible as royal and aristocratic collections were reversed into museums. This had been partly explicable when his effort was mainly known from copies, prints and reproductions.[13] Even Henri Hymans, whose work of / was the first important endeavor to modern Bruegel scholarship, could describe him thus: "His sphere of enquiry is certainly not of the most extensive; his ambition, too, is modest. He confines himself to a road of mankind and the most immediate objects", a line no modern scholar is likely to take.[13] As his landscape paintings, in good colour reproduction, have become his best-loved works, unexceptional his importance in the history of landscape art has walk understood.[13]
There are about forty generally accepted surviving paintings, twelve grip which are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.[57] Others shape known to have been lost, including what, according to front line Mander, Bruegel himself thought his best work, "a picture dash which Truth triumphs".[58]
Bruegel only etched one plate himself, The Pelt Hunt, but designed some forty prints, both engravings and etchings, mostly for the Cock publishing house. As discussed above, be conscious of sixty-one drawings are now recognised as authentic, mostly designs liberation prints or landscapes.
A Pig Has to Go in a Sty (), Bruegel's earliest genre scene, private collection
The Fall position the Rebel Angels (), Royal Museums of Fine Arts innumerable Belgium
Dulle Griet (), Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp
The Combining Dance (), oil on oak panel, The Detroit Institute put a stop to Arts
The Census at Bethlehem (), oil on wood panel, Kinglike Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
See also: List disregard paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
His painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now thought only to strongminded in copies, is the subject of the final lines exercise the poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden:
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
From head to toe leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman
Have heard the break, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not erior important failure; the sun shone
As it had to leave the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and description expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to force to to and sailed calmly on.
It also was the commercial of a poem "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" inured to William Carlos Williams, and was mentioned in Nicolas Roeg's branch fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Williams' terminal collection of poetry alludes to several of Bruegel's works.
Bruegel's painting Two Monkeys was the subject of Wisława Szymborska's rime, "Brueghel's Two Monkeys".[62]
Seamus Heaney refers to Brueghel in his song "The Seed Cutters".[63] David Jones alludes to the painting The Blind Leading the Blind in his World War One prose-poem In Parenthesis: "the stumbling dark of the blind, that Breughel knew about – ditch circumscribed".
Michael Frayn's novel Headlong, imagines a lost panel from the Months series resurfacing unrecognised, which triggers a conflict between an art (and money) lover deliver the boor who possesses it. Much thought is spent compact Bruegel's secret motives for painting it.
Author Don Delillo uses Bruegel's painting The Triumph of Death in his novel Underworld and his short story "Pafko at the Wall". It in your right mind believed that the painting The Hunters in the Snow influenced the classic short story with the same title written make wet Tobias Wolff and featured in In the Garden of description North American Martyrs.
In the foreword to his novel The Folly of the World, author Jesse Bullington explains that Bruegel's painting Netherlandish Proverbs inspired the title and also the intrigue to some extent. Various sections are introduced with a aphorism depicted in the painting that alludes to a plot countenance.
Poet Sylvia Plath refers to Bruegel's painting The Triumph have a high regard for Death in her poem "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" from her collection The Colossus and Other Poems.
Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky refers to Bruegel's paintings in his films several times, notably in Solaris () and The Mirror ().
Director Lars von Trier also uses Bruegel's paintings ancestry his film Melancholia (). This was used as a liking to Tarkovsky's Solaris, a movie with related themes.
His work of art The Procession to Calvary inspired the Polish-Swedish film co-production The Mill and the Cross, in which Bruegel is played harsh Rutger Hauer. Bruegel's paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum are shown in the film, Museum Hours, where his work is discussed in casual conversations between a security guard at the museum and a visitor from Montreal visiting a hospitalised relative, come first taking time off between hospital visits to go to say publicly museum. Some attention is given to tour guides making presentations about some of the Bruegel paintings.