Rest on the flight into Egypt

The Gospel of Matthew gives the flight into Egypt a single sentence: Joseph rose, took the child and his mother by night, and left. A halt along the way, with the family sitting down to rest in the open, came from later legend. In Antwerp in the 1510s and 1520s Joachim Patinir made that halt a reason to paint wide country, with a small holy family set inside it, and painters in the city kept the habit for generations. Brueghel took it up around 1600 on a very small scale. This is a round oak panel just over 21 centimetres across, and the museum credits it to Brueghel together with his workshop, the assistants who worked alongside him. It came from the Bavarian electors' own picture gallery in Munich, and today it is shown in a display case in Cabinet 8.