Surprise Attack on a Convoy

The Twelve Years' Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic expired in April 1621, and this panel was painted somewhere between 1620 and 1625, straight across that date. It shows what the fighting mostly looked like on the ground. Soldiers on foot and on horseback close in on a convoy still coming up the road. A shepherd and his sheep are caught in the middle of it, and off to one side a soldier is beating a pedlar.

Sebastian Vrancx made a speciality of exactly this kind of scene, and the figures here are his. His initials, an S crossed with a V, sit on the rump of the dapple-grey horse at the front. The landscape around them is by a Brueghel, and which Brueghel is unsettled. The museum's entry today names Jan Brueghel the Younger, born 1601. An older label on the picture carries the dates 1568 and 1625, which belong to his father.

The back of the panel is stencilled with the arms of Isabel de Farnesio, queen of Spain. By 1794 it was hanging at Aranjuez, in the room where the king slept through the afternoon.