information:classification
Early life

Bruegel's birth date is not documented, but inferred from the fact that Bruegel entered the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551. This usually happened between the ages of twenty to twenty-five, giving a range for his birth between 1525 and 1530. His master, according to Karel van Mander, was the Antwerp painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst.

The two main early sources for Bruegel's biography are Lodovico Guicciardini 's account of the Low Countries (1567) and Karel van Mander's 1604 Schilder-boeck. Guicciardini recorded that Bruegel was born in Breda, but van Mander specified that Bruegel was born in a village (dorp) near Breda called "Brueghel", which does not fit any known place. Nothing at all is known of his family background. Van Mander seems to assume he came from a peasant background, in keeping with the over-emphasis on Bruegel's peasant genre scenes given by van Mander and many early art historians and critics.

In contrast, scholars of the last six decades have emphasised the intellectual content of his work, and conclude: "There is, in fact, every reason to think that Pieter Bruegel was a townsman and a highly educated one, on friendly terms with the humanists of his time", ignoring van Mander's dorp and just placing his childhood in Breda itself. Breda was already a significant centre as the base of the House of Orange-Nassau, with a population of some 8,000, although 90% of its 1300 houses were destroyed in a fire in 1534. This reversal can be taken to excess; although Bruegel moved in highly educated humanist circles, it seems "he had not mastered Latin", and had others add the Latin captions in some of his drawings.

Between 1545 and 1550 he was a pupil of Pieter Coecke, who died on 6 December 1550. Before this, Bruegel was already working in Mechelen, where he is documented between September 1550 and October 1551 assisting Peeter Baltens on an altarpiece (now lost), painting the wings in grisaille. Bruegel possibly got this work via the connections of Mayken Verhulst, the wife of Pieter Coecke. Mayken's father and eight siblings were all artists or married artists, and lived in Mechelen.