Landscape with robbers sharing loot

Flanders in 1605 was four years short of a truce with the Dutch Republic, and decades of fighting had left the roads outside Antwerp worked by unpaid soldiers and deserters who robbed travellers for a living. Flemish painters turned that into a saleable subject. This oak panel, roughly 41 by 66 centimetres, shows a wooded track and a group of men going through what they have taken.

It had two authors. The forest and the hazy distance are Jan Brueghel's, painted with the fine enamel-like touch that earned him the nickname Velvet Brueghel. The figures are generally given to Sebastiaen Vrancx, an Antwerp painter who specialised in cavalry skirmishes and roadside robberies and who supplied that kind of small figure work to other men's landscapes. The panel has been in the National Museum in Warsaw since 1885.