Abraham Brueghel

The Brueghels were the most famous painting dynasty of the Low Countries, and Abraham Brueghel was born into its fourth generation, in Antwerp in 1631. His father was Jan Brueghel the Younger, his grandfather Jan Brueghel the Elder, and his great-grandfather Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the great painter of peasants and snowy villages.

Abraham did not stay to trade on the name at home. Still a teenager, he left for Italy in 1649 and spent his whole career there, in Rome and later Naples. He took up a subject the earlier Bruegels had never made their own, the opulent Baroque still life, filling large canvases with heaped southern fruit and flowers set before a marble urn, a fragment of antique sculpture or an open landscape. These decorative pieces were made for Italian palaces and aristocratic collectors, and in Italy he sometimes signed himself Ringhieri, an Italian form of his name.