A village landscape with a milkmaid, cattle and other figures

Houbraken claimed that Pieter Gysels was apprenticed to Jan Breughel the Younger on the basis of an entry in Breughel's diary that described a picture of his that had been retouched by 'Gys'. Whether or not this refers to Gysels is uncertain, although his artistic style and his landscapes in particular reveal a clear debt to Jan Brueghel the Elder. He became a member of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1649/50 and established himself as a painter of small-scale landscapes, of which the present work is a fine example.