(Antwerp 1601–1678)
A village road with a horse-drawn cart and numerous figures,
oil on copper, 23.6 x 31.6 cm, framed

The present painting comes with a certificate issued by Klaus Ertz, dated May 2017.

Ertz writes: “Having taken over his father’s studio in 1625, Jan Brueghel the Younger revisited compositional elements from his father’s works and developed them into autonomous and surprisingly novel compositions, his independent phase having set in in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. He made a name for himself with his own pictorial inventions, arriving at a conspicuous ‘personal’ style that has already fully come into its own in the painting to be assessed here. Compared with his earlier output and his painting style practised until the mid-1630s, his approach changed noticeably: if, in their love for detail, his earlier compositions are still reminiscent of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s work, starting in the 1640s, the individual landscape elements began to generously spread across the surface like carpets. This was also due to the fact the artist was working for the Parisian tapestry factory at the time. Village roads populated by figures and animals and lined by houses and trees remained Jan the Younger’s favourite motif throughout his lifetime.”

Ertz dates the present painting to the 1640s.