An extensive landscape with figures unloading carts beside a windmill on a knoll

Breughel depicted sweeping landscapes dotted with windmills in several compositions. The best-known version is perhaps the signed and dated (1607) version now in the Galleria Spada, Rome (Ertz, op. cit., no. 152), although Ertz believes that the present composition is closest to the version signed and dated '1611', now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (Ertz, op. cit, no. 155). In these paintings, the nearly monumental windmill is perched high on a hill, with figures loading up horse-drawn carts in the foreground and occasionally other windmills receding into the background - towards a distant townscape on a low horizon line (see Ertz, op. cit., nos. 152-169 for other versions).

A drawing closest to the Galleria Spada version of this composition and attributed to Jan Breughel the Elder is being sold in these rooms 26 January 2011 (lot 268).