The painting, which may be a pair to another work in the collection, ‘A Landscape with a Village on the Bank of a River’ (BHC0712), is assumed to have been painted by a follower of the Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the elder, who trained and worked in Antwerp. Brueghel visited Italy from 1590 to 1596 and his paintings cover a wide thematic spectrum including animals and mythological and religious scenes, as well as landscapes. The motif of the busy river and the peaceful life along its banks, as well as the compositional pattern using the river bank as a structuring diagonal, reappear several times in Brueghel’s oeuvre, and in copies such as this by a follower of the successful painter. Their popularity also continued throughout the first half of the seventeenth century in the work of Dutch artists such as Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael. The celebration of the ‘humble’ life around the canals and rivers of the Netherlands had found its appropriate artistic formula in Flemish art by 1600.

In this panel, the distinct quality of copper as a support medium becomes apparent. The artist deliberately used and incorporated the material’s warm tone in the overall colour scheme.