Big Fish Eat Little Fish by Pieter Bruegel

Big Fish Eat Little Fish by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1556, is a pen and brown ink drawing of swarms of big fish eating smaller fish that in turn eat smaller fish. A group of fishermen carve up a gargantuan fish devouring them all. This composition shows the likely influence of the older artist Hieronymus Bosch and his complex, proto-surrealist subject matter. Pieter Bruegel (Brueghel) the Elder (c. 1525 - 1569) was a Dutch/Flemish painter and printmaker of the Northern Renaissance. Among the first artists to incorporate realistic details and subject matter from landscape and the life of the common people, Bruegel all but invented the Dutch art of genre painting. His many lively and witty paintings of peasants influenced many generations of artists, from Rembrandt through the Realists of the modern era.