Lot Essay
This beautiful, refined copper is a testament to Jan Brueghel the Elder’s abilities as a painter of wooded landscapes. Brueghel had treated such subjects as early as the first half of the 1590s in paintings like those today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. 458), and Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (inv. no. 1285), both of which are datable to circa 1593. These early works, however, only found full expression in the early years of the seventeenth century in paintings like this, which Klaus Ertz dates to circa 1605 (loc. cit.).
Ertz considers the present painting to be a variant of the example in Vienna (loc. cit.). Here, as in the example in Vienna and, to a lesser degree the one in Frankfurt, Brueghel employed a broken tree trunk that leans diagonally over the water and guides the viewer’s eye deeper into the composition. Further painted details, including the hunter and his dogs, the deer, the yellow waterlilies, the stork in the painting’s middle ground and the yellow light emanating from upper left all reinforce the connection with the earlier works. Brueghel’s application of thin glazes to define minute details in the foliage further enhances the painting’s sense of spatial depth and intensely naturalistic appearance, while its small scale lends it a precious, jewellike quality.
Ertz considers the present painting to be a variant of the example in Vienna (loc. cit.). Here, as in the example in Vienna and, to a lesser degree the one in Frankfurt, Brueghel employed a broken tree trunk that leans diagonally over the water and guides the viewer’s eye deeper into the composition. Further painted details, including the hunter and his dogs, the deer, the yellow waterlilies, the stork in the painting’s middle ground and the yellow light emanating from upper left all reinforce the connection with the earlier works. Brueghel’s application of thin glazes to define minute details in the foliage further enhances the painting’s sense of spatial depth and intensely naturalistic appearance, while its small scale lends it a precious, jewellike quality.