" The other great influence in Pieter Bruegel's life was his mother-in-law, Mayken Verhulst Bessemers, who was an accomplished miniaturist. After being made a Master of the Antwerp Guild in 1551, Bruegel traveled around Europe. Like so many of his fellow Northern artists he studied in Italy for several years, where he worked under various artists, including Guilio Cluvio, a miniaturist. Bruegel also spent time studying in Switzerland, where he created many paintings of the Alps and the Swiss landscape .
Pieter Bruegel's paintings are unique in both their style and subject matter. A large part of Bruegel's paintings concentrated on peasant life. Nicknamed "Peasant Bruegel," he portrayed the peasants with his noted satire, but also with an element of honesty. Bruegel painted the common people in all of their everyday activities, from working, to religious practices, and even in their celebrations of local holiday's and festivities. It was in nature however, that Bruegel gained the majority of his inspiration and is therefore most well known for his landscapes. These landscapes, such as his most famous "Hunters in the Snow," held a vast amount of detail and depth and are unparalleled in European art . Much of Bruegel's work also had religious themes and contained a large amount of detail. These characteristics caused his work to disagree with artistic concepts of his time. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bruegel refused to adopt the idealized and more secular figures created by the Italian Renaissance artists. Despite the developments made in Italy, such as figures larger in scale and less of a concern with setting, Bruegel continued to produce paintings in his own style, with small figures in large and detailed settings. His unique use of atmospheric perspective gave his paintings depth .
Along with his distinctive emphasis on the peasant, Bruegel's paintings were also unusual in that they stressed the strange and the crude in the world and attempted to expose the flaws of mankind.
