An extensive open landscape with travellers on a path by a windmill

This is one of a group of paintings by Bredael of travellers in open landscapes by windmills that derives from a format created by Jan Breughel I, for the first time in the painting of 1607 in the Palazzo Spada, Rome (inv. no. 138), and known in a number of variants by him and his son. Examples by Bredael include those pictures in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg (inv. no. 790), the City Art Gallery, Manchester (inv. no. 1908.34), and the Puschkin Museum, Moscow (inv. no. 2011). Bredael re-employed motifs throughout his oeuvre, including landscape and figures - many also derived from Breugehlian protoypes - and the staffage in the present picture repeats that in the foreground of the painting by Bredael sold, Christie's, New York, 26 January 2001, lot 1 ($116,000).