Pieter Brueghel or Bruegel, known as the Elder, sometimes Gallicized as Pierre Brueghel the Elder, was a Brabantian painter and engraver born around 1525 and died on September 9, 1569, in Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands. Along with Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, and Peter Paul Rubens, he is considered one of the great figures of the Flemish School, and one of the main ones of the Antwerp School. The biography of Pieter Brueghel the Elder is extremely incomplete, and in the absence of written sources, historians are often reduced to hypotheses. The place and date of his birth lend themselves to much conjecture, as does the spelling of his name.