David Vinckboons Mechelen 1576 - 1629 Amsterdam

Laurent Meeùs, Avenue de Tervueren 285, Woluwe St. Pierre, Belgium, 1926 (when hung in the Dining Room, as by Peter Paul Rubens with figures by Velvet Breughel):
Thence by descent to his great-nephew.

This enigmatic picture has so far defied a satisfactory attribution.  Thought in 1926 to be a collaborative work between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, it is indeed likely to be a collaboration, but not between these masters.  The compositional scheme, with figures on a road at the margin of a dense wood, and a vista opening out across water to the left does indeed originate with Jan Brueghel the Elder, and is indeed the compositional basis for his early landscape, lot 21 in the current Evening sale.  The handling of the densely packed evergreen tree trunks to the right is also derived from Jan Brueghel and from Gillis van Coninxloo, but the feathery foliage of the trees framing the vista, and the ground below, is more reminiscent of a slightly later generation of landscapists, including Rubens, Jan Wildens and Lucas van Uden.  The distant prospect of the Château of Tervueren in the Foret de Soignes outside (then, now within) Brussels, familiar to us from numerous paintings and drawings of the early 17th century, is differently handled, and the foreground figures are certainly by another hand or hands: the wagon, woman and carter are close in style to Sebastiaen Vrancx, while the two peasants beyond are much more reminiscent of David Vinckboons.  The discrepancy in handling between the right hand and left hand parts of the landscape may perhaps indicate that the right hand part was indeed started by an artist close to Jan Brueghel the Elder, and perhaps finished by someone else, before the staffage was added.

A detailed study of this painting carried out by Dominique Allart and Alexandre Galand at the Université de Liège, dated 17 June 2002, of which a photocopy will be made available to the buyer, proposes that this picture was painted in the Workshop of Jan Brueghel the Elder, after 1618.