Jan Brueghel the Elder

Jan Brueghel the Elder was born into the most famous family in Flemish painting and made his own name in miniature. He was the younger son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the great painter of peasants, but he had barely turned one when his father died, so he inherited a name rather than a teacher. He grew into a specialist in tiny, jewel-like detail, painting flowers, forests teeming with animals, and glittering still lifes so fine that he earned the nickname Velvet Brueghel.

He often shared a panel with his close friend Peter Paul Rubens, the towering Baroque master. Rubens would paint the large figures and Jan would fill in the flowers, beasts and landscape around them, the two men trading strengths on pictures of Eden and allegories of the five senses.

Court painter to the Habsburg rulers of the southern Netherlands in Brussels, he was prosperous and admired. He died in Antwerp in 1625 in an outbreak of cholera that also took three of his children, and his own son, Jan the Younger, carried the family workshop on.