Jan Brueghel the Elder

Private collection, England;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 21 March 1973, lot 78, to Koetser for £28,000;
With Leonard Koetser, London,1973;
Private collection, Germany;
With David M. Koetser, Zurich, 1977;
Acquired from the above by the late owners in April 1979 for 750,000 Swiss francs.

K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere, Cologne 1979, p. 573, cat. no. 96, reproduced fig. 30;
K. Ertz and C. Nitze-Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere, vol. I, Lingen 2008, p. 298, cat. no. 139, reproduced.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Jan Brueghel the Elder. A River running through a small Town. Signed at lower right. This little painting on copper has been inset into a supporting wooden panel. The delicate detail has been finely preserved overall, with only occasional little minor imperfections. Under ultra violet light minute retouches can be seen in the sky including a slight slanting surface scratch at upper left. Just below the central cloud there are some slightly darkened touches, with one or two other little retouchings around the final distant houses on the right. The stronger, rather denser paint of the light middle distance is in largely beautiful condition, with occasional slightly thinner places in the darker more shadowy transparently glazed parts for instance. Tiny retouchings can be seen in some darker places, for instance around the steps to the boats on the left and the edges of the trees nearby. However while the figures in the darker boats on the left are magnificently intact the figures in the central boat are fractionally thin at the margins. Much of the extraordinary detail in the near foreground is also very finely intact, as are the trees overall, with the beautiful glimpse of the spire through the foliage on the left. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This is a relatively early landscape by Jan Brueghel the Elder, painted on copper and well preserved, that last appeared on the market in the 1970s. There is a drawing of the same composition which is likely to be preparatory for this work.

Around 1602–03 Brueghel seems to have experimented extensively with this compositional type – namely a canal or river passing through a town, enclosed on each side by a densely wooded river bank. Of particular relevance to the present example are the 1602-dated copper sold in Brussels in 1958, and the two signed works formerly with Galerie Gismondi in Paris, which, compositionally, both come particularly close to the present landscape, even including the ferryboat in the very centre of the waterway, seen directly from behind as it heads downstream towards town.¹ All on copper and of very similar dimensions, in each of these paintings Brueghel manifests a similar interest in the bird life and vegetation that inhabit these semi-urban thoroughfares. Each of them draws the eye in downstream to a cluster of dwellings and a distant, sun-drenched church beyond, in or just off-centre. There can be little doubt that these works are linked both in the chronology of Brueghel’s œuvre but also as a sort of project in itself, all being painted on similarly-size coppers and borrowing aspects and motifs from each other. They are supported by a small group of drawings of which one is directly linked to the present work and which would appear to be a well-worked study for it (fig. 1). This is thus one of the few works by Brueghel that can be connected with extant drawings by or attributed to the artist.

The painting marks the starting point of Brueghel’s trials with the theme of the river landscape, one that he would develop over the ensuing decade and that would culminate in the expansive and highly-populated masterpieces of the 1610s, such as the 1614-dated panel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and the 1612-dated copper sold in these Rooms in 2008.² In this small copper, datable to around 1602–03, we look along the left bank of a canal or river over a group of rowing boats towards a town, with the entire foreground devoted to the width of the waterway. Throughout his career Brueghel invariably focussed his composition on the left bank of the river and as the chronology of his river landscapes progresses it is possible to determine a greater focus on the quay itself so that, in several works from the period 1604–06, the composition has been widened from the constraints of the present, earlier, example to allow a quay to dominate almost the entirety of the left half of the picture plane.³ Subsequently, in the afore-mentioned later works from the 1610s, the quay rather than the river becomes the principal focus and itself inhabits the entirety of the foreground in the river’s place which is subjugated to the right-hand margin. Brueghel’s compositional developments gradually brought the narrative to the fore, with the focus on the interplay of human figures, whereas in the early landscapes such as this, Breughel’s concentration seems less on a narrative and more on the interplay of the natural world, and all its fascinating elements, with the artifice of human construction.

1. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz 2008, under Literature, p. 296, cat. nos 136–38, all reproduced.
2. Ibid., pp. 286–88, cat. no. 133; and pp. 284–86, cat. no. 132, both reproduced.
3. See, for example, the works dated 1606 in the Wellington Museum, London and sold London, Sotheby’s, 7 July 2004, lot 28; ibid., pp. 271–73, cat. nos 120 and 121, both reproduced.