Landing Stage Near a Village

The broad river running straight out towards the horizon here was not Jan Brueghel's own invention. The Alte Pinakothek traces this composition, which it calls innovative, back to a drawing by his father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, made decades earlier. In 1615 Jan was in his mid-forties and one of the most successful painters in Antwerp, and what he brought to the borrowed design was people. After 1610 the figures in his landscapes grew larger, and here they take over the foreground, at a landing stage beside a village where boats come in to the bank. The copper plate is about 26 by 37 centimetres. In the 19th century it was given a German frame, made as part of a matching set together with the frame of the busy forest road of 1605 in this same room.