Travellers Ambushed by Brigands

High in the mountains a convoy of riders, carriages and armed escorts has run into a band of robbers. Shots are fired, men go down, and horses and figures tangle among steep, jagged rocks. Berchem painted it around 1670 after a model by Pieter van Laer, a Haarlem painter who had spent more than a decade in Rome and was known there as Bamboccio. Attacks on travellers were a subject Van Laer and his followers returned to, and the danger behind it was real. Banditry plagued the roads of 17th-century Italy, especially in the hills of the Papal States, and people travelled in armed company for that reason. By the time Berchem took up the model, Van Laer had been dead for almost 30 years. The picture belonged to Gerard Bicker van Swieten in The Hague in 1741 and later to a baroness at Warmond, near Leiden, and it was bought for the Dutch royal collection in 1816.