Landscape

Jan Brueghel was one of the busiest painters in Antwerp, elected in 1601 to head the city's Guild of Saint Luke, the association of painters. He was a son of Pieter Bruegel, famous for his peasant scenes, and he carried the family trade into a new century. The Prado dates this panel no more closely than the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Over his working life his landscapes were changing. The high fantasy mountains of earlier Flemish painting were giving way to flatter, closer country you might actually have walked through, roads and villages under a wide sky. His touch was so fine and enamel-smooth that collectors nicknamed him Velvet Brueghel. Here he worked hand in hand with Joos de Momper, one man laying in the setting while the other added the figures.