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Lot Essay
This exceptionally well preserved, and hitherto unknown, panel represents an exquisite addition to Jan Brueghel the Younger’s early oeuvre. After he completed his training in the workshop of his father, Jan Brueghel the Elder, in Antwerp, he travelled to Italy where he studied under the patronage of Cardinal Federico Borromeo and spent time with his childhood friend, Anthony van Dyck. After learning of his father’s sudden death, he returned to Antwerp in 1625. There he joined the Guild of Saint Luke and successfully took over the family enterprise, continuing to work in his father’s mature style, which was greatly sought after in the late 1620s.
This charming landscape might have been painted during this highly prolific period, as it closely replicates a copper plate executed by Jan Brueghel the Elder in 1616 now in The Harold Samuel Collection, Mansion House (K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625), Lingen, 2008, I, pp. 169-170, no. 60), as well as a drawing from the same year in the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig (inv. no. NI 465a). On the edge of a village with tall, sparsely leaved trees, a group of colourfully dressed ladies gather around a covered wagon, which is being prepared for departure by a groom hitching up three horses on the lower left of the painting. A drover herds cattle along the country road in the foreground on the right; a group of travellers stand outside an inn drinking from a large jar. Each group of figures is surrounded by a bright and lucent aura, bestowing on this richly coloured village scene a particular freshness and vibrancy.
A version of the composition by Jan Brueghel the Younger was recently sold in Vienna (Dorotheum, 17 October 2017, lot 98). The colours in the latter are rendered less harmoniously and the brushwork is slightly less crisp. As such, this version was dated by Ertz to the 1640s, when the quality of, and demand for, the Brueghel workshop was already in decline.
This charming landscape might have been painted during this highly prolific period, as it closely replicates a copper plate executed by Jan Brueghel the Elder in 1616 now in The Harold Samuel Collection, Mansion House (K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625), Lingen, 2008, I, pp. 169-170, no. 60), as well as a drawing from the same year in the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig (inv. no. NI 465a). On the edge of a village with tall, sparsely leaved trees, a group of colourfully dressed ladies gather around a covered wagon, which is being prepared for departure by a groom hitching up three horses on the lower left of the painting. A drover herds cattle along the country road in the foreground on the right; a group of travellers stand outside an inn drinking from a large jar. Each group of figures is surrounded by a bright and lucent aura, bestowing on this richly coloured village scene a particular freshness and vibrancy.
A version of the composition by Jan Brueghel the Younger was recently sold in Vienna (Dorotheum, 17 October 2017, lot 98). The colours in the latter are rendered less harmoniously and the brushwork is slightly less crisp. As such, this version was dated by Ertz to the 1640s, when the quality of, and demand for, the Brueghel workshop was already in decline.