Marten van Cleve

Marten van Cleve's birth year rests on a single sentence. In a document of 2 April 1567 he declared that he was 40 years old, which places his birth in 1526 or 1527. By then he had spent his whole career in Antwerp. He entered the city's painters' guild of Saint Luke in 1551, the same year as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the painter of peasants and proverbs, and he worked the same ground of village fairs, weddings and farmyards.

Van Cleve's peasants are observed more than moralised. They eat, dance, bargain and slaughter in crowded, anecdotal scenes. He married Maria de Greve in 1556, and all four of their sons became painters. Through the 1560s his workshop turned out repeated versions of his own compositions, and some of his inventions, such as the Twelfth Night feast known as The King Drinks, were taken up by Bruegel's son Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

The early biographer Karel van Mander noted that van Cleve, unlike many Antwerp painters of his day, never made the journey to Italy. He died in Antwerp in 1581, suffering by then from gout.