(Brussels 1568–1625 Antwerp)
Canal landscape with two workshops at the banks
fragments of a signature at lower left: B.... HEL 1.0.,
oil on copper, 17.5 x 22.5 cm, framed

With the brand of the plate maker Peeter Stas (active between 1587 and 1610) on the reverse.

We are grateful to Klaus Ertz for confirming the attribution after examination of the painting in the original (written communication, March 2015).

Ertz writes: “The present painting can be said to have survived in good condition. The paints, applied in the impasto technique, still give a jewel-like and brilliant impression, while the overlapping, translucent glazes are excellently preserved. The copper plate is one of the thick and heavy types produced in the early 17th century […]. When compared to the ‘world landscapes’ of the 16th century, the approach to reality in the present picture has fundamentally changed. Different from the art of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, for example, here the beholder no longer looks down on a scene set far below, but metaphorically speaking almost enters the picture’s space. Nevertheless Jan Brueghel the Elder maintains the distance between the spectator and the composition by still choosing a slightly raised vantage point. At the same time, the artist ‘narrates’ episodes from contemporary everyday village life, such as the conversation between villagers, animals moving about freely, figures attending to horses, and the loading and unloading of barges. These ‘story-telling’ village landscapes number among the artist’s most advanced and pioneering compositions, which he started tackling around 1605. They can generally be assigned to the genre of ‘village scenes by a river’, which involves the peculiar combination of two themes of landscape painting that also existed individually: the village landscape and the river landscape. In this painting, the 16th century’s rigid division into the three colours of brown, green, and blue has been entirely overcome. Spatial depth is now merely accentuated by zones of light and shade and, of course, by the canal, which orthogonally extends into the background. Foreground, midground, and background seamlessly blend into one another.”

Ertz compares the present painting to the following works by Jan Brueghel I, all of which are closely related to it in terms of composition and painterly handling:

1. Village Scene with a Forge (Pushkin Museum, Moscow, signed and dated 1603);
2. Village Road (Alte Pinakothek, Munich, signed and dated 1610);
3. Village Landscape with a Canal (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, signed and dated 16.7);
4. Village Road with a Canal (private collection, signed and dated 1609)

Ertz continues: “Like the present painting, the works by Jan Brueghel the Elder mentioned above belong to the landscape type of ‘wide river landscape’. The beholder’s eye wanders across the picture and its spatiality as a whole without ‘getting stuck’. Horizontals dominate over verticals, although the row of houses on the right-hand side still betrays vertical tendencies, which would play a role in the painter’s work throughout his career as a formal and compositional means to organise the two-dimensional surface of the picture. In terms of chronology, the painting to be assessed here must be assigned to approximately the period in which the comparative examples mentioned above were made. Given the development of Flemish landscape painting in general and the similarities between the aforementioned compositions and the present painting in particular, the latter seems to date from the mid-1610s.”

A slightly different copy of the present composition by the hand of a follower of Jan Brueghel I was sold at the Vienna Dorotheum on 24 June 2015 as lot 20.

The present picture probably shows a reloading point on the Herenstals canal in the surroundings of Antwerp. We can see so-called “hessenwagens”, coaches drawn by six or eight horses, by which goods were shipped from Antwerp to Southern Germany and Italy.