New website makes Bruegel’s masterpieces accessible to all

Last month saw the 450th anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, an anniversary that has been marked with a year-long programme events around Flanders and Brussels dedicated to the Flemish Master. Now a new website has been launched to act as an online museum providing a complete overview of the painter’s rich oeuvre.

The site, in both Dutch and English, is an initiative by the Flemish arts consortium Vlaamse Kunstcollectie (VKC), as a way to present Bruegel’s work in one place. The real paintings, held in collections around the world, are too fragile to travel widely. As well as an online collection, the website contains a comprehensive biography, texts about his work, news, related literature and details of the institutions that hold his works.

“To this day, Bruegel continues to inspire,” said Manfred Sellink of Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA). “It is great that through this site we can make the master’s work permanently accessible.”

VKC is a joint venture between the KMSKA, Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, Mu.ZEE in Ostend and M Leuven. In creating the new website it had support from a number of international museums and institutions that provided images of the works in their collections.

Since 2010, VKC has launched five other online museums, each with a specific art-historical theme: the Flemish Primitives, baroque in the Southern Netherlands, James Ensor, George Minne and abstract modernism. The sites combine in-depth information with accessible texts for both experts and a general audience.