JAN BRUEGHEL I (BRUSSELS 1568-1625 ANTWERP)
JAN BRUEGHEL I (BRUSSELS 1568-1625 ANTWERP)
JAN BRUEGHEL I (BRUSSELS 1568-1625 ANTWERP)
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JAN BRUEGHEL I (BRUSSELS 1568-1625 ANTWERP)

A wooded river landscape with hunters

Details
JAN BRUEGHEL I (BRUSSELS 1568-1625 ANTWERP)
A wooded river landscape with hunters
signed ‘BRV[E]G[...]’ (lower center)
oil on copper, stamped on the reverse with the maker’s mark of Pieter Stas (active Antwerp, c. 1587-1610)
5 x 7 in. (12.6 x 17.9 cm.)
Provenance
with Agnews, London.
Private collection, England, 1957-1997.
with David Koetser, Zurich, where acquired by a private collector on 15 March 1997, by whom sold,
[Property from an American Collection]; Sotheby’s, New York, 29 January 2009, lot 10.
Literature
K. Ertz and C. Nitze-Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568-1625): Kritischer Katalog der Gemälde, IV, Lingen, 2008-2010, p. 1630, no. Add. 5, illustrated.
Special notice
On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in the outcome of the sale of certain lots consigned for sale. This will usually be where it has guaranteed to the Seller that whatever the outcome of the auction, the Seller will receive a minimum sale price for the work. This is known as a minimum price guarantee. This is such a lot.

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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.

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