Landscape with Wagons

A party of travellers has stopped on the road and men have come up to the wagon. The museum's own record says the scene resists reading. It may be a hold-up, or it may be an ordinary halt on a bad track. Brueghel signed and dated the panel in the lower left corner, BRVEGHEL 1603, in years when the war between Spain and the rebel Dutch provinces was still running and goods travelled overland in convoys of covered wagons, galeras in Spanish, which is where the picture gets its Spanish title. Further back the track carries more wagons and people on foot into the distance, and the grey sky opens at one point to let light down onto the hills. In 1794 the panel hung in the music room of the royal palace at Aranjuez.