An extensive river landscape with travellers on a road, a castle and mountains beyond

This eponymous artist is named after a picture of the Calling of Saint Matthew in the Musées Royal des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (inv. 6087). The picture is signed with the monogram 'L.C.' which closely configures with the monogram 'L.G.' employed by Lucas Gassel, to whom the picture was traditionally attributed. However, on account of its distinctive handling, Burton Dunbar was first to disassociate the name of Gassel from the Brussels picture (B. Dunbar, Landscape Paintings of Cornelis Massys, Ph.D diss., University of Iowa, 1972); a notion that was elaborated on by Walter Gibson who pointed out various stylistic discrepancies between the two hands (W.S. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting, Princeton, 1989, pp. 20-1). A handful of other works were connected to the Brussels picture, most notably the unfinished Arrival of the Holy Family in Bethlehem (Metropolitan Museum, New York, inv. 16.69), and the Christ on the Road to Emmaus in the (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunten, Antwerp, inv. 5018). Luc Serck, in a chapter of his study of Henri Met de Bles, assembled a group of twelve works that he deemed to be by the same hand (L. Serck, Henri Met de Bles et la peinture de paysage dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux avant Brueghel, Ph.D diss., Université Catholique de Louvain, 1990, VI, pp. 1252-58), and he has kindly confirmed the attribution for the present picture.