Pieter Brueghel the Younger was born in 1564 in Antwerp, son of the famous Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the brother of Jan Brueghel the Elder. Later there is proof that he was a pupil of Gillis van Coninxloo. As the son of a Master, Pieter was accepted into the St Luke’s Guild in Antwerp as a Free Master. Of the nine pupils produced by his workshop, the animal painter Frans Snyders and Gonzales Coques, the genre painter, are worthy of note. Throughout his life Pieter II lived in financially straitened circumstances. He possessed neither his own house nor did he undertake the obligatory educational journey to Italy. He seems never to have left Antwerp. He died there in 1637/38, at the advanced age of seventy-three.