(Antwerp 1601–1678)
Merchants and travellers in an extensive landscape,
oil on panel, 33 x 41.9 cm, framed

We are grateful to Klaus Ertz for confirming the attribution of the present painting (certificate of 27 January 2016).

In this painting, Jan Brueghel II harks back to a compositional type developed by his father that can be described as ‘from a hilly towards a flat landscape’. This type begun in the Flat Landscape in the Prado, Madrid (1603), and was continued in the Dresden Bittern Hunter (1605) and the Extensive Landscape with Travellers on a Country Road in the Saint Louis Art Museum (c. 1610), before the final goal was reached in 1610 in a miniature on copper, Travellers on a Country Road. Yet this earliest example of a truly Netherlandish flat landscape of miniature size was not developed in Holland, but in Antwerp. With his interpretation of the Walloonian hilly landscape in the present painting, Jan Brueghel II has formulated a variation of the possibilities of expression offered by this type of extensive landscape. According to Klaus Ertz the present composition is a later work by the artist, when he had developed his own, individualistic style.