Jan Breughel the Elder Brussels 1568 - 1625 Antwerp

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Description

Jan Brueghel the Elder
Extensive landscape with a peasant leading a Waggon between trees to the right
bears attribution in brown ink, lower right: Jean Breugel de Velours and numbering 1527 and paraphe (see Provenance);
pen and brown ink and brown and blue wash, indented for transfer

Provenance

Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville (with his paraphe, L.2951, and numbering 1527);
Prince Repnine, his sale, Paris, Lair-Dubreuil, 6 June 1907, lot 28;
sale, London, Christie's, 24 June 1980, lot 13 (£3,200);
sale, Amsterdam, Christie's, 16 November 1981, lot 11

Literature

J. Labbé and L. Bicart-Sée, La collection de dessins d'Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, Paris 1996, p. 240, no. 1527, reproduced

Catalogue Note

In composition, style and handling, this drawing is highly characteristic of Jan Breughel; though it does not correspond exactly with any of his other paintings or drawings, the motif of a cart being led along a raised path through trees, and the panoramic view across a mountainous river landscape are familiar from many of his works.

As Huigen Leeflang has very kindly informed us, this drawing was engraved, in reverse, by Crispijn de Passe, as one of a series of four grand landscapes after Jan Breughel, published by the engraver himself in around 1604 (Franken 1273; Hollstein 654). The prints were dedicated to a certain Jacob Jacobsz. (for a discussion of his possible identity, see Ilja Veldman, Crispijn de Passe and his Progeny (1564-1670). A Century of print production, Rotterdam 2001, pp. 78-9). Rather surprisingly, the four prints also bear inscriptions identifying the seemingly anonymous travellers in the landscapes as Biblical patriarchs, in this case Abraham.

Veldman's proposal that these prints by de Passe were executed around 1604 was made on the basis of comparison with the dated Landscape with Waggons and a Distant View of Antwerp, in Frankfurt, which is stylistically extremely comparable with the present drawing (see Breughel - Brueghel, exhibition catalogue, Essen, Villa Hügel, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, and Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1997-8, cat. no. 160, reproduced). Both in the present drawing and in the Frankfurt sheet, the handling in details of trees and figures, and in the distant city view, is similar to what we see in the highly detailed landscapes that Breughel made a few years earlier, for engraving by Aegidius Sadeler. A definitive earlier drawing of this type is the 1596 Mountain Landscape with a Port, in the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (see M. Winner, 'Zeichnungen des Älteren Jan Brueghel', Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 3, 1961, p. 202, fig. 9). Yet the present drawing also has slightly freer aspects, which look forward to later drawings such as the Country Road with Waggons in a Flat Landscape of circa 1618-20 (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. nr. 5544; see Breughel - Brueghel, exhibition catalogue, op. cit., cat. no. 171).