Jan Brueghel the Elder – Landscape with Windmills

Jan Brueghel the Elder
(Brussels 1568 – Antwerp 1625)

Landscape with Windmills
Tempera on panel, 30.3 x 47.4 cm

Signed by the painter and dated 1607 in the lower left-hand corner, the painting is recorded in 17th-century inventories among those belonging to Cardinal Bernardino Spada.
A small masterpiece that sums up the visual and spiritual world of Brueghel the Elder, the painting is related to a drawing in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and to several replicas, copies and later versions based on it. The quality of the painting is still that of the Flemish tradition, meticulous, perfect and lenticular, while Brueghel’s view is completely modern, presenting, from a bird’s-eye perspective towards an infinite horizon, the synthesis of the rural world and its everyday ‘doings’ with the eternity of the landscape and the Nordic light. The women’s work in the foreground, the millers and carters going about their business, is depicted in bright and varied colours; the clearest and brightest blue is that which defines the vast plain in the background; against a clear summer sky, furrowed by the flight of flocks of sheep, the two large windmills stand out as symbols of the commercial civilisation of Flanders.

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