Landscape with village

By 1779 this panel was hanging in the Casita del Príncipe at El Escorial, the small pavilion built for the future Charles the Fourth while he was still Prince of Asturias, where little Flemish pictures were hung close together for private looking. It carried the number 60, and that number is still painted in white on the lower left of the picture. The old descriptions tell you what people saw in it. In 1818, in Aranjuez, a clerk wrote: a landscape with a village, a bridge, plenty of figures and a dog. The 1857 catalogue is fuller, hilly country full of farmhouses, a road on the left with travellers on it, a river with its bridge on the right. On the back there is a handwritten label that goes further still and counts five figures in the foreground, and a white dog. The Prado dates the panel to the first quarter of the 17th century and titles it, simply, Landscape.