Gypsy Gathering in a Wood

Most of the Brueghels in the Prado carry only a date range. This one is fixed: the painter signed it and wrote 1612 beside his name, low on the copper plate. It is a small thing, 36 centimetres by 43, painted on metal rather than wood, which is part of why the greens and the far blue distance still read so cleanly. In 1746, when Philip the Fifth's pictures at La Granja were inventoried, a clerk looked at it closely and described what he saw: figures he took to be gypsies, one of the women talking to a muleteer, another sitting to one side with a child on her knee, and several loaded pack-mules. The Prado's title still names that group, though the identification is an old reading rather than anything the painting states. In the lower right corner the plate carries a painted saltire cross, the collection mark of Philip the Fifth.