Landscape

The Prado does not give this small copper plate to Jan Brueghel outright. It is catalogued as attributed to him, because everything in it matches his landscapes of about 1604 to 1610 while nothing documents the commission. The museum records one appealing possibility: that he painted it in the summer of 1604, during his stay at the Prague court of Emperor Rudolf II, and that Roelant Savery, a Flemish painter then working for the emperor, saw it there and used it as the model for his own Forest with a Fruit Seller. The picture is built the old way, in three parallel bands of colour, brown, then green, then blue, a 16th-century habit that this painter softens where the bands meet. The whole thing is 24 centimetres tall.