Amy Orrock, Curator and Art Historian, asks who was Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His small body of surviving paintings demonstrating his supreme ability to depict the daily life of the peasants with both humour and humility.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569) was an undisputed master; his small body of surviving paintings demonstrating his supreme ability to depict the daily life of the peasants with both humour and humility. This lecture will introduce Bruegel as a distinctive artistic voice in the sixteenth century, and consider the ways in which his revolutionary images were transmuted and popularised after his death in the works of his two sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564/5-1638) and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Examples are drawn from the exhibition Bruegel: Defining a Dynasty (2017, Holburne Museum, Bath) which Amy co-curated.

Dr Amy Orrock is an art historian and curator who has published and lectured widely on northern European art of the 16th and 17th centuries. She first became fascinated by Bruegel as an undergraduate at University College London and then completed her PhD on Pieter Bruegel the Elder at the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition Bruegel: Defining a Dynasty at The Holburne Museum. Amy is currently senior curator at Compton Verney Art Gallery & Park, where she has curated the exhibitions Painting Childhood: From Holbein to Freud (2019) and Cranach: Artist and Innovator (2020-21). Amy’s Arts Society lectures include: Who was Bruegel? Discovering the Master through his Sons and Bruegel’s Winter Scenes.