The Painter and The Buyer is a 1565 pen and ink on brown paper painting by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Bruegel is limited entirely to the presentation of two dissimilar men: the painter drawn in detail with disheveled hair, bushy eyebrows and unkempt beard, and the more vague outline reproduced viewer behind him with pince-nez, long nose and mouth slightly open.

[1] In the Middle Ages, artists were fixed in a craft tradition supported by clients such as church, aristocracy and later the bourgeoisie.

[1] According to Hans Ost there is an "ignorant observer" who "with his mouth stupidly open, laboriously peers through his glasses over the artist's shoulder.

This is the connoisseur and amateur, as we later find him in the circle of Roman antiquarians around Philipp von Stosch"[2] The identity of the painter, often assumed to be a self-portrait of Bruegel, is uncertain; it is also conceivable that its a portrait of Hieronymus Bosch.