Imaginary Wooded Landscape

The panel is only about 15 by 25 centimetres, smaller than a sheet of writing paper, and a single tree takes up much of it. Its trunk is gnarled and hung with moss and ivy, and beneath it small figures walk, rest and busy themselves on the water. Van Geel signed it at the lower centre, running his name together as iacobvgeel.

He painted it around 1636, close to the last years for which any record of him survives. The panel went through sales in London in 1933 and in Amsterdam in 1952 before it reached the collection of Edmond and Leonore Hertzberger, who lent it to the Mauritshuis in 1996 and gave it outright in 2008.