Alpine Landscape

The canvas is just over a metre high and two and a half metres wide, and there is a whole country inside it. A valley opens between mountains, a castle sits on a crag, riders hunt, men fish, small figures walk about, and plants and birds are picked out one at a time. The eye is placed somewhere nobody could stand, high above all of it.

The Prado dates the picture 1600 to 1615. Antwerp painters had been making these panoramas for nearly a century by then and the manner was on its way out. Younger men in the same city were dropping the horizon and moving in close to fields, roads and villages, while Verhaecht went on building the old kind of view, the land fading from warm brown in front to green and then to blue at the back.

At the top centre there is a coat of arms. Somebody commissioned the painting and had their arms put into it, and the museum says nobody has identified them. The picture appears in the inventory of the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid in 1794, as number 361.