An extensive landscape with riders on a path, a man fishing in a lake, a chateau at left, with a church on the distant horizon

Jan Wildens counts among the most important landscape painters active in Antwerp in the first half of the seventeenth century. His artistic success saw him regularly collaborate with many of the city’s artistic luminaries, including Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Frans Snyders. In 1613, almost a decade after he became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, Wildens travelled to Italy. There he encountered the work of Paul Bril, which was to have a marked influence on Wildens’s subsequent style. Landscapes like the present painting exude a calm, classicising and bucolic atmosphere that recalls Bril’s exemplars.

Characteristic of Wildens is the use of a prominent tree with twisting trunk in the central foreground, the deep recession into space along the central dirt path and the screen of trees at right that build up pictorial depth through a series of verticals and horizontals. A similar approach is found in Rubens’s Return from the Harvest of circa 1635 in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (inv. no. 14), a picture that Wildens may have been responding to when developing this composition. On account of this association, Wolfgang Adler has dated this panel to the late 1630s (op. cit.).