A wooded landscape with cavaliers at the edge of a forest preparing an ambush

This composition was clearly extremely popular as it exists in a number of versions by both the Antwerp painter Sebastiaen Vrancx and his contemporary in Amsterdam, David Vinckboons. The composition would appear to have originated with Vinckboons, in a horizontal format, a fine example of which is now in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. A version, similarly of horizontal format but ascribed to Vrancx, was sold in Berlin, Lepke, 30 September 1913, lot 240, while a painting of vertical design by Vrancx, and of the same dimensions as the present picture (with only minor differences in the detail), is in the Museum of Western and Orient Art, Kiev. The calibre of the present painting is extremely high and not the work of a copyist or studio-collaborator (as inferred by an entry in the RKD archives, which describes this work as ‘(naar?) David Vinckboons’ / ‘trant/naar Sebastiaan Vrancx’), however, given the complex nature of the relationship between these multiple variants, an attribution to Vinckboons cannot be complexly excluded.