An Italianate landscape with herdsmen and cattle by a stream, buildings in the hills beyond

This drawing will be included by Luuk Pijl as no. 66 in his forthcoming publication Paul Bril: the paintings. Pijl has kindly pointed out that this lot is one of only four known bodycolour drawings by Bril. The others are also landscapes, but with biblical scenes: Christ tempted by the Devil in the Twents Museum, Enschede, dated 1613; The Temptation of Christ, signed and dated 1612; and The Calling of Saint Peter, signed and dated 1615, both in Schloss Nymphenburg, Munich. The distant view in the present bodycolour is very similar to that in the Munich Temptation of Christ. Pijl further points out that the present bodycolour is a smaller variant of Bril's picture dated 1620, formerly in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, and last seen at auction in Dsseldorf in 1932. Consequently Pijl also dates the present lot to circa 1620.
Bril is known to have settled in Rome in 1574, and died there in 1626. He was among the very first of the Netherlandish landscape artists to settle and work in Italy, starting the long lasting tradition of northern artists travelling south and interpreting the very different light and topography that they found there. Bril's Italianate landscapes had a great influence on the development of landscape painting in Holland and elsewhere. The present lot illustrates just how much Claude is indebted to Bril for his landscape compositions.