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Big Fish Eat Little Fish

Prints and Drawings

Big Fish Eat Little Fish is a 1556 drawing by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, held at the Albertina museum in Vienna, that was engraved for publication by Pieter van der Heyden in 1557. It illustrates a Flemish proverb about the strong preying on the weak, showing a huge fish beached on shore and cut open by a man with a knife to reveal smaller fish inside it, some of which themselves contain still smaller fish, while more fish-eating-fish appear in the water beyond. When the engraving was published, the print seller attributed the design to the already-famous Hieronymus Bosch, who had died forty years earlier, rather than to Bruegel. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Medium
Medium (category)
Engraving 1
Classification
Genre
Drawing 1
Year Created
1556 2
Connections

In Genre

Drawing, Art Forms

Entity-backed identity for the genre enum value this work already carries, resolved to an arts art-form by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The genre fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the work unchanged.

In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Big Fish Eat Little Fish (Wikipedia)
  • Genre reference
    Big Fish Eat Little Fish is a 1556 drawing by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, held at the Albertina museum in Vienna, that was engraved for publication by Pieter van der Heyden in 1557.
  • infobox medium field: Brush and pen drawing; gray and black ink;; Engraving
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2. Wikidata: Big Fish Eat Little Fish
  • Wikidata Q698510, class allow-list match (w-bbfill-artsarchag-0926 resolve_missing)
  • Wikidata Q698510, P571 claim (w-bbfill-artsarchag-0926)
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