Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1568-1625, was born in Brussels, Belgium.

Jan Brueghel the Elder was a Flemish artist and a draughtsman. He was the son of the eminent artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder. A close friend and a frequent collaborator of Peter Paul Rubens, the two artists were the leading Flemish artists of the first three decades of the seventeenth century. He worked in many genres including history paintings, flowers in still-lifes, allegorical and mythological scenes, landscapes and seascapes, hunting piece, and village scenes, battle scenes, and scenes of hellfire and underworld. He invented new types of paintings such as flower garland paintings, paradise landscape, and gallery paintings in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. He was nicknamed Velvet Breughel,Flower Brueghel and Paradise Breughel , because of his mastery in the rendering of fabrics, for his specialisation in flower still lifes, and the last one to his invention of the genre of the paradise. landscape. A number of paintings with fantastic depiction of fire and grotesque imagery for which his brother Pieter Brueghel the Younger,was nicknamed as Hell Brueghel are now reattributed to Jan Breughel the Elder. Jan Breughel who had lost both his parents early, came to live along with his brother and sister with his maternal grandmother, an artist in her own right. She taught them drawing and water colour painting. Jan and his brother went to Antwerp to study oil painting, under Peter Goetkint, who unfortunately died in1583. Jan left for Italy to complete his studies, as was common for Flemish artists to do, of the time. He returned to Antwerp in 1596, after his apprenticeship and collaborations with a number of artists in Italy . Jan Brueghel achieved a superb technical mastery, which enabled him to render material, animals and landscapes with remarkable accuracy and a high degree of finish. He had accomplished a miniaturist technique allowing him to achieve an accurate description of nature. As Jan Brueghel was an artist with a wide range of skills in various genres, he collaborated with other artists frequently. But his collaboration with Peter Paul Rubens was remarkable. Together the produced 25 works. They worked in different styles and specialisations and were artists of equal status. The joint artistic output of Breughel and Rubens were highly sought after, throughout Europe by collectors . Jan Breughel’s realistic depiction of nature in all its forms, in flowers, animals, landscapes, etc. was clear in line with the view that the study of god’s creation was an important source of knowing god. Breughel ‘s era saw the increased access to new animals and exotic plants, and ideas were tried to categorise and classify them. Breughel’s works reflect this contemporary encyclopaedic interest in this classification and ordering of the natural world. It is evidenced in his flower pieces, landscapes, allegorical works and gallery paintings . Breughel’s endeavour to represent the world through ordering and classifying its many elements did not stop with the natural world. His allegorical paintings of the four elements and five senses reveal the same classifying obsession, using each element or sense to organise natural, man-made instrument and scientific objects. In this skilful union of the areas of art, science, and nature Brueghel demonstrates his mastery of these various disciplines. His paintings serve the same purpose to that of encyclopaedic collections by linking with Mundus sensibilis and Mundus intelligibilis. Jan Brueghel was one of the first artists in Southern Netherlands to paint pure flower still-lifes. Breughel’s approach to these works was informed by his desire to display his skill in giving a realistic, almost a scientific rendering of nature , which reflected his ideological concern demonstrated in his work that nature was a revelation of a god ,with the interest in gaining a scientific understanding of nature. He composed his bouquets with flowers blooming in different seasons, and arranged them in the bouquets with an almost scientific precision. In the painting,Flowers in a Ceramic Vase, (c.1620) the vase holding the flowers is decorated with motifs in relief. Four cartouches —separated by fantastic figures—allegorically represent the four elements to symbolise air, water,fire and earth. Jan Brueghel’s father, Pieter Brueghel the Elder is regarded as an important innovator of landscape art. Jan Brueghel developed on the formula he learnt from his father of arranging country figures travelling a road which receded in the distance. By carefully diminishing the scale of figures in the foreground, middle ground and far distance, and by varying the tones of brown, green, and blue progressively, he was able to emphasise the recession into space and further the sense of perspective, and also characterise the recession of space. He gave his landscape paintings strong narrative elements by using the surrounding landscapes as the stage for crowds of village people engaged in various activities, in the market, on the roads or during rowdy kermesses. These landscape paintings with narrative elements and attention to details had significant influence Flemish and Dutch landscape artists in the 2nd decade of the 17th century. He was also one of the prime developers of the dense forest landscape in the 17th century. He captured the verdant density and mystery of the forest. Jan Brueghel invented the Paradise Landscape where native European and exotic animal species coexist harmoniously in a lush landscape. In his Paradise Landscapes, Jan Brueghel tried to render the worldview, which regarded earth and its inhabitants as revelations of a god and valued artistic representation of, and scientific investigation into, that divine revelation. In these landscapes the novelty of Brueghel lies not only in the impressive variety of animals he studied, but also in their presentation of both as figures of a religious narrative and as subjects of a scientific order. Jan Brueghel produced various sets of allegorical paintings in particular on the themes of Five Senses and Four Elements. In his allegories he illustrated an abstract concept, such as one of the senses or one of the four elements, through a multitude of concrete objects, as in the composition Allegory of Fire; Venus in the forge of Vulcan, where, in the composition, Brueghel’s encyclopaedic approach offers such details that an information can be collected on the types of tools used in 17th century metallurgical practice. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Frans Francken the Younger were the first to artists to create paintings of Art and Curiosity Collections in the 1620s, known as Gallery Paintings. They depicted collections of art objects together with other items such as scientific instruments and peculiar natural specimens. The paintings are heavy with allegories and symbolism. They reflect the intellectual preoccupation of the age, including the cultivation of personal virtue and the importance of connoisseurship. Breughel contributed to the to the development of the genre of the Monkey Scene also called . Comical scenes with monkeys in human attire In a human environment, enacting various human activities, were a playful metaphor for all the folly in the world. Jan Brueghel’s painting, Monkeys Feasting includes a painting by Rubens’s studio, Ceres and Pan. This representation provides the contrast between Cultivated versus the Wild World of monkeys.