Circle of Jan Brueghel The Elder

A Wooded River Landscape in Summer With Travelers Arriving at an Inn

oil on panel

15 1/4"×25 3/4" inches (39×65.4 cm.)

PROVENANCE:
Private Collection, Maryland

Antwerp in the first quarter of the seventeenth century was the most important art center in Flanders. Production, dealing, and collecting were at a high point, strictly controlled by the Guild of St. Luke which required dealers as well as artists to join. Paintings of all types were produced to meet the demands of an escalating mass market with ever-changing tastes. (1)

Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 - 1625), one of the city’s most influential artists of the period, was a catalyst in the movement of Netherlandish landscape painting towards a greater naturalism. (2) His employment of a more realistic viewpoint with a stronger horizontal emphasis, distinct color-scheme and subject matter complemented by minute detailing became a touchstone for decades. (3)

The appeal and popularity of Brueghel’s landscapes created a number of followers, many still unidentified. Scores of artists are recorded in the guild archives to whom no known paintings can be attributed. Even within the body of works given to recognized artists, different hands emerge. A problem arises when a seventeenth century market is viewed from a twenty-first century perspective, one in which name recognition is paramount. When these artists painted the emphasis was on the end product not the individual, evident from contemporary estate inventories in which the majority of paintings are recorded only by subject and quality. (4)

Our painting, a reflection of its market and period, incorporates a number of Brueghel’s innovations known by 1610. Replicated is the artist’s wedge-shaped composition in which the road veers to one side while the water leads the viewer into the distance, framed on either side by houses and dense woods. (5) The placement of wagons and riders moving in opposite directions on the road underscores the illusion of depth. (6) The vibrant color pattern follows Brueghel’s usage, favoring brown tones in the foreground, green in the mid-ground with a blue background ending in distant blue mountains merging with the sky.(7) Populated by twenty-four figures as well as pigs, chickens, a rooster, cows, dogs, horses, swans, herons, ducks, and other birds, homage is paid to Brueghel’s legacy encapsulating the everyday reality of a Flemish village into a painted ideal.

(1) Hans Vlieghe, Flemish Art and Architecture 1585 -1700, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998, pp. 6-7. (2) Ibid, p. 180. (3) Arianne Faber Kolb, Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 81. (4) Jeffrey M. Muller, “Private Collections in the Spanish Netherlands: Ownership and Display of Paintings in Domestic Interiors” exhibition catalogue Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Age of Rubens, September 22, 1993 - January 2, 1994, p. 198. (5) Vlieghe, op. cit., p. 180. (6) Marjorie E. Wiesman, “Jan Brueghel the Elder”, in The Age of Rubens, op. cit. p. 463. (7) Klaus Ertz, “Some Thoughts on the Paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder”, exhibition catalogue Brod Gallery, London, Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1979, p. 12.

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