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Panoramic Landscape with Travellers

(1568 Netherlands)

Colnaghi

Sale, Drouot, Paris, 27 December 1944, lot 11; Private Collection, France; Sale, Binoche et Godeau, Paris, 19 November 1993, lot 80 (as Jan Brueghel the Younger); with Bob P. Haboldt, New York, 1995 (as Jan Brueghel the Elder); Private Collection, The Netherlands.

New York, Bob P. Haboldt, Fifty Paintings by Old Masters, 1995, no. 12; Essen, Villa Hügel and Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere–Jan Breughel der Ältere, 26 August 1997–14 April 1998, no. 66 (catalogue by Klaus Ertz); Phoenix, Art Museum; Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; and The Hague, Mauritshuis, Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Painting on Copper, 1575 – 1775, 19 December 1998–22 August 1999, section 8, p. 154, ill (catalogue by Michael Komanecky et al.).

Son of the great Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Elder was arguably the most important European artist to have painted on copper. Certainly he was one of the most prolific – approximately half of his oeuvre was painted on this support and the majority of these works are, like the present painting, landscapes. It seems likely that his fascination with this practice began during a six-year stay in Italy (1590-1596), where the use of copper was not unknown: Sebastiano del Piombo, Correggio and Parmigianino had produced works of this kind in the 1520s, followed in the 1560s by Vasari and Bronzino in Florence and then a decade later by Bartholomeus Spranger in Rome (for a full discussion, see the exhibition catalogue, Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Painting on Copper, 1575-1775, Phoenix Art Museum and other locations, 1998-99, pp. 150-54). It was while Brueghel was in Rome that he met Paul Bril, whose earliest known work on copper was done in 1592, and the two artists collaborated on a painting on copper the following year. There he also met the German Hans Rottenhammer, with whom he collaborated on two small pictures on copper, the Rest on the Flight (c. 1595; Mauritshaus, The Hague) and the Descent into Limbo (1597; Mauritshaus, The Hague). In 1595 and 1596, Brueghel visited Milan at the insistence of cardinal Federico Borromeo, one of his most important patrons, for whom he painted a number of small-scale landscapes on copper (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan).

Klaus Ertz (loc. cit.) dates the present landscape to circa 1610, several years after Brueghel’s return to Antwerp, where he continued to work on copper until his death. Although he often painted landscapes as settings for allegorical, mythological or religious themes, this work appears to contain no such meaning, although it is possible that the skeleton in the foreground may serve as a warning against the dangers of travel. Brueghel depicts here an assortment of peasants, merchants and travellers set within a delicately rendered landscape, framed on the left by a forest and opening up on the right to a panoramic view of a distant city. The most striking feature of this landscape is the extraordinary sense of perspective that the artist creates within the composition, an accomplishment that is all the more remarkable given the small scale of the work. This is achieved through a combination of linear and aerial perspectives: the furrows in the soil – with many of the travellers arranged along them – lead the viewer’s eye back to a point of convergence in the distance, while a sense of depth and recession is created through the softening of forms and subtle gradation of colours - from brown through green to yellow and then blue - towards the white of the horizon.

A drawing for the man in the left foreground is in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth, while the dog in the same group recurs in two other works from 1607 (one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the other in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich).