(Antwerp 1601–1678)
Peasants on a track with travellers on horseback in an extensive landscape,
oil on panel, 33 x 41.9 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 19 April 2016, lot 70;
Private European collection

Klaus Ertz confirmed the attribution of the present painting to Jan Brueghel II (written certificate dated 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 Gemäldegalerie, Dresden Bittern Hunter (1605) and the Extensive Landscape with travelers on a Country Road in the Saint Louis Art Museum (circa 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.