Pieter Brueghel the Younger

Pieter Brueghel the Younger built a career on his father's imagination. He was the eldest son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the great 16th-century painter of peasants and proverbs, but his father died when he was only about five, leaving him too young to have learned anything directly. What he had instead were the drawings and the demand: everyone wanted Bruegels.

So he ran a busy Antwerp workshop that turned out careful copies and versions of his father's compositions, the snowy villages, the wedding feasts, the crowded proverbs, for a wide market of buyers. Because many of the elder Bruegel's originals are now lost, these repetitions are often our best record of what the father actually painted.

He also had a taste of his own for scenes of fire and damnation, crowds of little devils and burning towns, which earned him the nickname Hell Brueghel. He kept the family trade going for decades in Antwerp and died there in 1637 or 1638, in his early seventies, having trained a workshop of pupils who copied the old man's villages long after he was gone.