拍品专文
Jan Brueghel the Elder and Joos de Momper the Younger enjoyed a fruitful collaboration over the course of some thirty years beginning in the early 1590s, through to at least 1623, that resulted in no fewer than 200 hundred surviving pictures (see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, op. cit., nos. 604-810). The vast majority of these paintings saw Brueghel add the figures into the mountainous panoramas for which de Momper was so highly regarded. The present winter landscape is a relatively unusual collaboration between the two artists, with fewer than thirty such examples known. Their joint production of these winter scenes only appears to have begun in the second decade of the seventeenth century.
It is perhaps fitting that Jan the Elder provided the staffage for this landscape, which Klaus Ertz has dated to circa 1615-20 (op. cit.). As Teréz Gerszi has pointed out, the painting is a unique take on the tradition of Jan’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (op. cit.). The painting, which Gerszi described as a ‘very high quality forward-looking’ (‘sehr qualitätvolle vorwärtsweisende’) landscape, displays ‘only a faint reflection’ (‘nur einen schwachen Abglanz’) of the elder Bruegel’s pioneering Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap of 1565 in Brussels (fig. 1). Specifically, de Momper has flipped the structure of the composition so that the most prominent houses anchor the left rather than right-hand portion of the composition while retaining the earlier painting’s striking orthogonally-drawn canal.
It is perhaps fitting that Jan the Elder provided the staffage for this landscape, which Klaus Ertz has dated to circa 1615-20 (op. cit.). As Teréz Gerszi has pointed out, the painting is a unique take on the tradition of Jan’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (op. cit.). The painting, which Gerszi described as a ‘very high quality forward-looking’ (‘sehr qualitätvolle vorwärtsweisende’) landscape, displays ‘only a faint reflection’ (‘nur einen schwachen Abglanz’) of the elder Bruegel’s pioneering Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap of 1565 in Brussels (fig. 1). Specifically, de Momper has flipped the structure of the composition so that the most prominent houses anchor the left rather than right-hand portion of the composition while retaining the earlier painting’s striking orthogonally-drawn canal.