Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526/1530–1569)
Title: Landscape with the Parable of the Sower
Genre: religious art
Date: 1552
Medium: oil on panel
Dimensions: Height: 74 cm (29.1 ″); Width: 102 cm (40.1 ″)
What I love about this painting:
Pieter Brugel the Elder was one of my first influences in the world of art appreciation. What always strikes me about his work is the innocent joy he infused in his art. This particular painting has a delicate, almost watercolor feel to it.
In this piece, the color of the river is the unique shade of blue that appears in his other works.
The parable he illustrates (via Wikipedia):
In the (Biblical) story, a sower sows seed and does so indiscriminately. Some seed falls on the path (wayside) with no soil, some on rocky ground with little soil, and some on soil which contained thorns. In these cases the seed is taken away or fails to produce a crop, but when it falls on good soil it grows, yielding thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold.
Jesus then (only in the presence of his disciples) explains that the seed represents the Gospel (the sower being anyone who proclaims it), and the various soils represent people’s responses to it (the first three representing rejection while the last represents acceptance).
About the Artist, via Wikipedia:
Pieter Bruegel (also Brueghel or Breughel) the Elder (/ˈbrɔɪɡəl/, also US: /ˈbruːɡəl, ˈbrɜːɡəl/, Dutch: [ˈpitər ˈbrøːɣəl] c. 1525–1530 – 9 September 1569) was the most significant artist of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so-called genre painting); he was a pioneer in making both types of subject the focus in large paintings.
He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and later painting in general in his innovative choices of subject matter, as one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting. He also painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to settle in Antwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer of prints for the leading publisher of the day. Only towards the end of the decade did he switch to make painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the following period of little more than a decade before his early death, when he was probably in his early forties, and at the height of his powers.
Credits and Attributions:
Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. 030.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Pieter_Bruegel_d._%C3%84._030.jpg&oldid=356083009 (accessed September 20, 2019).
Wikipedia contributors, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder&oldid=915292603 (accessed September 20, 2019).
Wikipedia contributors, “Parable of the Sower,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parable_of_the_Sower&oldid=907267798 (accessed September 20, 2019).
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 