Pieter Bruegel the Elder valuation
Hunters in the Snow and The Tower of Babel, by the painter whose sons and grandsons made his name a family business.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (about 1525–1569) worked in Antwerp and, from 1563, in Brussels.
What a work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder is worth
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Bio
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (about 1525–1569) worked in Antwerp and, from 1563, in Brussels. After travelling to Italy in the early 1550s he designed drawings for the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock, landscapes and moralising scenes in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, and in the 1560s painted the pictures that made him famous: The Tower of Babel, the series of the seasons that includes Hunters in the Snow, and scenes of peasant life such as The Peasant Wedding. Around forty paintings by him survive, and the largest group, twelve, is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. His sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder founded a dynasty of painters that lasted for more than a century.
Paintings by Bruegel himself almost never come to market. What does, in large numbers, is the work of his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger, whose busy studio painted versions of his father's compositions, from winter landscapes to the Netherlandish Proverbs, for decades after his lifetime; the spelling with an 'h' usually marks the family rather than the father. Those versions vary greatly in quality and in how much the younger Pieter painted himself, and the quality of the copy and the condition of the panel decide the value. The prints after Bruegel's designs, published by Cock and reprinted later, are the other accessible part of his work, and early impressions are worth much more than later editions.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
