A capriccio of the Campo Vaccino, Rome, with elegant company and peasants

Sebastian Vrancx arrived in Rome as a young man of 23, and travelled around Italy between 1591-1601, working very much in the manner of Paul Bril, who was in Rome at the same time. An album of drawings from the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth contains many of his sketches of Italian views and monuments, a resource that would have proved invaluable once he had returned to Antwerp (see M. Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Northern European Drawings, Turin, 2002, II, pp. 250-305). One sketch from this collection, The Temple of the Tiburtine Sibyl at Tivoli, executed in pen and brown ink and showing a detail of the temple's crenellated columns, directly relates to the depiction of the temple columns on the left hand side of the present picture (op. cit., p. 305, no. 1326). This panel, stamped on the reverse with the coat-of-arms of the city of Antwerp, can be dated on stylistic grounds to the 1640s, when Vrancx's work became increasingly refined and graceful, with a greater emphasis on space.