Pieter Bruegel the Elder died in Brussels on 9 September 1569. He was about forty-four. Look at the winter panel below and start at the top, where the sky is not blue but a pale grey-green, the colour of thin ice held up to a window. Then the branches: thin, black, drawn with a brush not much wider than a hair, and the birds sitting in them at intervals a bird would actually choose. Then down to the hunters, coming left to right with spears and one poor haul, and the dogs, whose ribs you can count. Only after all that do you notice the smoke at the far left, where figures tend a fire outside the inn with its hanging sign, and realise the whole picture is arranged around going home to it.

The second panel is his crowded village of proverbs, dozens of small sayings acted out at once, and the pleasure of it is that no single group is more finished than any other. Every little butcher and window-leaner got the same care.

His sons were tiny when he died, one about five, one still an infant. Both became painters, and the elder of them spent a long working life making versions of his father's compositions, snow and skaters and proverbs, over and over, for buyers who wanted them. That is not a lesser thing. A great deal of what we know of Bruegel we know because a workshop kept copying him for decades, patiently, in the same cold colours.