A landscape with windmills, travellers and wagons in the foreground and a town beyond

Details

Attributed to Jan Brueghel I (Brussels 1568-1625 Antwerp)
A landscape with windmills, travellers and wagons in the foreground and a town beyond
black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown and blue wash
9 5/8 x 13 1/8 in. (24.4 x 33.3 cm.)

Provenance

with Colnaghi, London, 1949.
Dr. Francis Springell; Sotheby's, London, 30 June 1986, lot 25.

Literature

F. Davis, in The Illustrated London News, 24 October 1959, p. 489, illus.
Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth Century, exhib. cat., London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1972, p. 21, under no. 15.
Bruegel: une dynastie de peintres, exhib. cat., Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1980, p. 192.
D.J. Johnson, Old Master Drawings from the Museum of Art, R.I.S.D., Providence, Rhode Island, 1983, p. 213, under no. 75.
K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere: Die Gemälde, Lingen, 2008, p. 320, under no. 152.

Exhibited

London, Royal Academy, Flemish Art 1300-1700, 1953-4, no. 547.
London, Colnaghi, and Newcastle Upon Tyne, Hatton Gallery, Loan Exhibition of Drawings by Old Masters from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Francis Springell, 1959, no. 40, pl. XVII.
Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Francis Springell, 1965, no. 23.

Lot Essay

Related to one of Brueghel's best-known paintings in the Galleria Spada, Rome, dated 1607 (Ertz, op. cit., no. 152), a version of which in oils is being sold in these rooms, 26 January 2011 (lot 23). Other drawings of the composition are in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (op. cit., fig. 178), and in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (D.J. Johnson, op. cit., no. 75).
An attribution to Jan Brueghel II (1601-1678) has also been suggested.

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