Pen and brown ink, 21.8 × 30.2 cm, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Koenigs collection). One of the finest Alpine sheets: a pass with a mule train winding up it, the valley falling away, the peaks built of small hooked strokes and dots. The composition is of the kind Cock engraved in the Large Landscapes; it is the drawing that Van Mander's 'swallowed the mountains' describes.

Pen and brown ink, 31.1 × 40.1 cm, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo. A broad valley with a herd and a shepherd in a landscape of hills, the largest of the early sheets; its attribution has been discussed (Mielke accepted it), and the Oslo museum holds it as Bruegel's. The breadth of the view anticipates the Sower.

Pen and brown ink, 17.6 × 26.4 cm, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques. A river valley with a town, drawn on the journey south — one of the earliest dated landscape sheets, already with the high viewpoint and the patient, even pen of the Alpine series. The Louvre's Bruegel drawings are few and this is the most important.

Pen and brown ink, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. A hillside with a monastery — Italian in its architecture — among slopes drawn in the fine, regular hatching of the journey; the Berlin cabinet's holding of Bruegel drawings, assembled in the nineteenth century under Friedrich Lippmann, is one of the three or four most important, and Hans Mielke's 1996 catalogue of Bruegel's drawings was built on it.

Pen and brown ink, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The southernmost point of the Italian journey: Reggio seen across the strait, with smoke rising from the town — burned by the Turkish fleet under Dragut in 1552, which dates the sheet to that year or just after. The drawing was the basis of the strait in Cock's 1561 print of the Naval Battle in the Straits of Messina. Wikidata's 1500 is a placeholder.

Pen and brown ink, 23.2 × 33.6 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington. The saint, tiny, kneels before a crucifix at the left; the rest is an Alpine valley with a river and a far town. The sheet is dated 1553 and is the closest of the drawings to the Large Landscapes prints — a version of the subject was engraved. Washington's Bruegel drawings came with the Rosenwald and other gifts.

Pen and brown ink, 23.5 × 34.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington. A farmyard with cows and figures under a tree: a Flemish subject drawn in the manner of the Italian sheets, and one of the few early drawings of a village rather than a mountain. Its attribution has been questioned in favour of a follower; the Washington museum keeps it as Bruegel's.

Pen and brown ink, Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels (Prints Department). A small wooded stream with a mill and an angler, drawn after the return to the Netherlands — a Brabant subject in the patient hand of the Alps. The Brussels Royal Library holds several of Bruegel's print-designs (the Justice and Luxuria among them) and this landscape.

Pen and brown ink, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. An Alpine landscape with Christ and the two disciples on the road — a composition related to Cock's Large Landscapes print of the same subject; the Rotterdam sheet is regarded by Mielke and others as a copy or a workshop version after Bruegel's lost design rather than the original, and is listed here with that caveat.

Pen and brown ink, 22.8 × 29.8 cm, signed and dated 1556, British Museum. The earliest-dated of the Sins designs: Avarice, a woman counting coins in her lap, surrounded by money-changers, a toad, a burning city, and the creatures of the Boschian hell; the caption in the print is 'grasping avarice sees neither honour nor shame'. The British Museum's sheet is among the best preserved of the seven.

The sheet

Pen and brush in grey-brown ink, 21.6 × 30.7 cm, signed and dated brueghel 1556 at the lower right — Albertina, Vienna. The preparatory drawing for the engraving published by Hieronymus Cock in 1557 — the print that made Bruegel's name, and that Cock issued under the inscription Hieronymus Bos inuentor, attributing the young man's design to the dead master whose brand sold prints.

The image

A colossal fish lies beached on a shore, its belly slit open by a small man with a knife the size of a sword, and from the wound pour fish, each of which has a smaller fish in its mouth, each of which has a smaller fish in its own; all along the shore, in the sea, in the air, in the boats, fish are eating fish; a fish walks on legs with a fish in its mouth; a fish hangs from a tree; a fisherman in a boat in the foreground points the moral out to his son — 'see, son, I have known for a long time that the big fish eat the small'. The proverb — de grote vissen eten de kleine — was Europe's oldest statement of the law of the strong, and Bruegel's image of it was the most inventive anyone had made: Bosch's creatures put to work as an argument.

The drawing and the print

The Albertina sheet is a finished design: the composition complete, the tones indicated with wash, the details worked out for the engraver, who reversed it. Pieter van der Heyden cut the plate; Cock published it with Latin and Dutch captions. The survival of the drawing, signed by Bruegel, is the evidence that Cock's attribution to Bosch was a commercial fiction; the print-buying public of 1557 was told it was buying Bosch, and got Bruegel.

Meaning

The proverb's moral is the world's: the strong eat the weak, and the small man with the knife — the 'little man' who cuts open the great fish — is either justice or the next predator. The image has been read politically in every century since; in 1557 it was a Bosch-style joke with a hard centre.

What to look at

The knife; the fish walking on legs; the fish-in-fish-in-fish; the man pointing in the boat; the signature, which is the proof.

Pen and brown ink, 22 × 30 cm, signed and dated 1557, private collection. Envy, a woman eating her heart, with a turkey (the newly imported bird of the New World, an Antwerp novelty) and a dog fighting over a bone, before a shoe-shop full of peering customers; the one of the seven in private hands.

Pen and brown ink, 23 × 30 cm, signed and dated 1557, Fondation Custodia, Paris. Gluttony sits drinking at a table with a pig beside her, in a landscape of eating and vomiting, a mill that grinds men, a giant's mouth; the second of Lugt's Sins.

Pen and brown ink, 22.6 × 29.6 cm, signed and dated 1557, Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels. Lust embraced by a demon in a grove, with a fountain of lovers, a tree of lust, a hollow tree of hermits; the most Boschian of the seven in its creatures.

Pen and brown ink, 22.9 × 30 cm, signed and dated 1557, Fondation Custodia (Frits Lugt collection), Paris. Pride, a woman admiring herself in a mirror held by a demon, with a peacock beside her; a hell of mirrors and fashions; Lugt's collection has two of the Sins designs and this is the more famous.

The print

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel's design, published by Hieronymus Cock, 1558; 22.5 × 29.5 cm. The Sin of Sloth from the Seven Deadly Sins series — the drawing, dated 1557, is in the Albertina and is also in this catalogue — and the print through which most of Europe knew it.

The image

Sloth, a woman, lies asleep on the back of an ass, her head on a pillow, while a demon pulls her by the hair; a giant figure with a clock for a head and a snail beside him rests at the right; the landscape is full of sleepers, idlers, a man in bed in a tree, a monk asleep in the road, clocks and snails; a burning city is at the back; the Dutch caption reads, in Cock's verse, that sloth breaks strength and dries the nerves. The Bosch apparatus — the hybrid creatures, the hell-landscape — is deployed with Bruegel's density.

The Sins

The seven prints — Avarice, Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust and Sloth — were Cock's most successful series and Bruegel's chief claim to the 'second Bosch' title; each shows the sin personified at the centre of a landscape of its consequences, with a Latin and Dutch motto; the Last Judgment of 1558 completed the set. Their inventiveness — the creatures are Bosch's language spoken faster — made them the standard images of the Sins for a century.

What to look at

The sleeper on the ass; the clock-headed giant; the snail; the man in bed in the tree; the caption.

Pen and brown ink, 21.4 × 29.8 cm, signed and dated 1557, Albertina, Vienna. The design for the print of Sloth in this catalogue: the sleeper on the ass, the clock-headed giant, the snail. The Albertina's Bruegel drawings — this, Big Fish, the Painter and the Buyer, Spring, the Last Judgment — are the most important single group.

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel, published by Cock, 1557; Musea Brugge. A schoolroom of grotesque children at their lessons under a schoolmaster with a birch, with an ass at a music-stand trying to read — the proverb 'though an ass go to school, it will not come back a horse'. The caption is the moral; the schoolroom, with its fools and its dunces, is one of Bruegel's earliest comic inventions, and the print was among the most popular.

Pen and brown ink, 22.8 × 30.1 cm, signed and dated 1557, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Wrath, a woman in armour with a sword, strides across a field of combat attended by a bear and a man with a knife in his mouth; a giant's gaping head is a hell-mouth; a tent of war stands behind. The only Bruegel drawing in an Italian collection.

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel, published by Cock, 1558; National Gallery of Art, Washington (Rosenwald collection). The print from the British Museum's design: avarice counting coins, the toad, the money-changers, the burning city. The Rosenwald set of the Sins is complete and in fine impressions.

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel, Cock, 1558; National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gluttony at her table with the pig; the mill that grinds men; from the Lugt drawing.

Engraving by Frans Huys after Bruegel, published by Cock, 1558; Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, and the Metropolitan Museum. Skaters on the frozen moat outside the St George's Gate of Antwerp — the first of Bruegel's skating scenes, seven years before the Hunters — with the caption warning that the slipperiness of the ice is the slipperiness of life. A topographical view of a city gate, a winter genre scene and a moral emblem in one.

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel, Cock, 1558; National Gallery of Art, Washington. Lust in her grove with the fountain of lovers; from the Brussels drawing. The seven prints, with the Last Judgment, made a set that sold across Europe for a century and was reissued from the worn plates into the 1600s.

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel, 22.5 × 29.5 cm, Cock, 1558; National Gallery of Art, Washington. Pride with her mirror and peacock, in a hell of vanities; the print reverses the Lugt drawing.

Pen and brown ink, 23 × 30 cm, signed and dated 1558, Albertina, Vienna. The design for the print that completed the Sins series: Christ in judgement above, the saved in a small group at the left, the damned poured into a Leviathan's mouth at the right — the Boschian hell-mouth at its most elaborate. The drawing is among Bruegel's most finished sheets.

Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden after Bruegel, Cock, 1558; National Gallery of Art, Washington. Wrath's armoured stride through a battlefield of knives; from the Uffizi drawing.

Pen and brown ink, 22.3 × 29.4 cm, signed and dated 1559, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Koenigs collection). Charity, with a pelican on her head, stands among the seven works of mercy — feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoners, burying the dead — each enacted by villagers in a square.

Pen and brown ink, 22 × 29.4 cm, signed and dated 1559, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Faith stands on a stone in a church with the instruments of the Passion, amid the sacraments being administered — baptism, confession, communion, marriage, a sermon — in a church interior that is the one such in Bruegel's work. The Rijksmuseum's only Bruegel drawing.