Paul Bril

Both in frescoes and in drawings, Paul Bril and his sadly short-lived brother Matthijs (who died suddenly in 1583 at the age of only 33) were responsible for many of the most important developments in the landscape art produced in Rome over a period of nearly half a century, between their arrival in the Eternal City in the early 1570s and the rise to pre-eminence of Claude Lorrain. 

In a drawing such as this, the attribution of which has been kindly confirmed, on the basis of a digital image, by Dr. Louisa Wood Ruby, we see very clearly the dialogue between the Flemish Mannerist landscape idiom out of which Bril’s art was to grow and the more serene, proto-Claudian style of the drawings for his celebrated Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi frescoes of 1611-13.¹ 

Of the previously published drawings by Bril, a Rocky Wooded Landscape, in the Uffizi² and a related drawing in a Swiss Private Collection³, both dated 1608, along with a Wooded Landscape of 1609, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge⁴ are perhaps the most similar in handling to this newly identified sheet.   

1. For example the study now in the British Museum (inv. no. 2021,7028.1); sold, New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 2021, lot 31

2. Inv. No. 653P; L. Wood Ruby, Paul Bril: The Drawings, Belgium (Brepols) 1999, p. 103, no. 59, pl. 67

3. Ibid., pp. 103-4, no. 61, pl. 69

4. Ibid., pp. 105-6, no. 66, pl. 74