Landscape with Travellers and Peasants on a Track

Two kinds of traffic share this hillside track. A train of wagons comes down the slope past travellers resting by the road, and a little way off a group of peasants dances to a violin. Beyond them the land falls away to a river with a jetty and a bridge, and a turreted Gothic building stands on the far bank. The National Gallery calls the picture an exercise in aerial perspective, the painters' way of making distance with colour, warm near at hand and cooler and bluer the further the eye goes. Brueghel signed it and painted it in 1610 on a sheet of copper, whose smooth surface let him work this small. The gallery does not own it. It hangs there on loan from a private collection, and it was last sold at auction in London in 2008.