Paradise Landscape with Animals

In 1613 Jan Brueghel painted the animals of the Flood filing towards Noah's ark. Several copies survive, and the Budapest museum describes that picture as the model for about a hundred paradise landscapes. The earliest dated version is at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. This panel, from between 1613 and 1615, is accepted by Brueghel's leading specialist as a repeat by his own hand. The Bible story gave him a reason to fill a green landscape with birds and beasts, and a few of them are borrowed. The grey horse and the two lions were adapted from paintings by the Antwerp master Peter Paul Rubens. Late in the Second World War most of the museum's collection was loaded onto rail cars and sent west, and this panel passed through the collecting point the Americans ran in Munich before it came home to Budapest.