Jan Brueghel the Elder

This fine, freely-drawn image of a grand rocky landscape with caves and a gypsy encampment, which seems to be previously unrecorded, is a unique exploration in the medium of drawing of a theme that Jan Breughel the Elder painted on several occasions.¹ Other, similarly composed scenes, with mountain grottoes to one side and a distant view to the other, though in most cases with figures celebrating a rustic mass rather than simply camping, include a painting in Saint-Germain-en-Laye², and another sold in 1930.³

Stylistically, this cannot be an early drawing by Jan Brueghel, whose drawn compositions from the outset of his career depend more on the works of his illustrious father, Pieter Brueghel the Elder. All the same, the handling does in some areas resemble that seen in the generally more precisely drawn Landscape with Tobias and the Angel, in Budapest, which Teréz Gerszi and Louisa Wood Ruby date to 1595-96.⁴ That said, the overall breadth of wash is perhaps closer to the rapidly drawn sheet of a Road in a Village, in the P. & N. de Boer Foundation, Amsterdam, which is a study for a painting dated 1614.⁵ 

Another distinguishing feature of this unusually lively and animated composition is the sheer quantity of figures that it contains, all engaged in their different activities, resulting in an overall effect in some ways reminiscent of the artist’s rare sheets of figure studies, such as those at Chatsworth, and in the Abrams Collection.⁶ 

Yet despite this attention to the details of individual figures, the composition retains a unity, breadth and energy comparable to some of the artist's very finest sheets, such as the Landscape with Wagons on a Road, in the British Museum, or the uniquely atmospheric landscape on blue paper, in Budapest.⁷ Despite having been in the very distinguished collection of the Parisian lawyer Eugène Rodrigues (1853-1928), the drawing seems to have remained until now unknown to scholars, and its reappearance represents a significant addition to the group of this outstanding draughtsman’s most accomplished drawings. 

1. K. Ertz Jan Brueghel der Altere, 4 vols., Lingen 2008, nos. 796-800

2. Musée Municipal (Inv 137bis; Ertz, vol. IV, pp. 1598-9, no. 786

3. Ertz, op. cit., vol. IV, pp. 1603-4, no. 792

4. Jan Brueghel – A Magnificent Draughtsman, exh. cat., Antwerp, Snijders&Rockox House 2019-20, pp. 50-51, no. 14

5. Ibid., pp. 120-121, no.44a

6. Ibid., nos. 30 & 34, respectively

7. Ibid., nos. 46 & 47 respectively