All That Glistens

Jan Brueghel the Elder was a versatile artist, nicknamed ‘Velvet Brueghel’ for his meticulous and delicate brushwork. Although trained in his birth city of Brussels, Jan Brueghel’s earliest recorded works date to the mid-1590s from his travels in Italy. During this period, he worked on a significant group of still lifes and landscapes for Cardinal Federico Borromeo, founder of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, which are among the best documented commissions of paintings on copper in history. Following his return to Antwerp in 1596, Jan Brueghel quickly became established with financial success and steady patronage, becoming court painter to the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella, regents in the Southern Netherlands, a decade later.

Considered one of Jan Brueghel’s most beautiful and balanced landscape compositions, this spectacular work on copper was painted at the height of his artistic achievements. It depicts a fair, or Kermis, during which a religious festival is celebrated by a rustic party. While this subject was made popular by the artist’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan’s visions celebrate the peaceful, bucolic aspects of country life without the drunken debauchery characteristic of the patriarch’s work. Unusual for its large format, this is an ambitious synthesis of two types of pictures he frequently painted throughout his career – village scenes (e.g. Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace, inv.RCIN 405513) and river landscapes (e.g. The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., inv. 2000.4.1). His View of Schelle (Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, inv. 9102), a work painted a year later shows a similar strategy.