(Antwerp 1601–1678)
A wooded landscape with Abraham and Isaac on their way to the place of sacrifice,
oil on panel, 51 x 67 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Belgium

The present painting comes with a certificate issued by Klaus Ertz (in photocopy, May 2012).

Ertz writes: “The colours of the picture give a shining and vibrant impression. Applied in a thick impasto, they are typical of the time in which the picture was painted, i.e. towards the late 1620s. The overlapping glazes are excellently preserved […]. The composition on which the present painting is based was invented by the father (Jan Brueghel the Elder) in the last year of the sixteenth century (with Noortman, Maastricht, in 2006). We know a further unsigned painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder of the same subject matter, which is now in the Landesmuseum Mainz. Until towards the mid-seventeenth century it was entirely common for Flemish artists to paint several versions of a theme that sold successfully, which were executed either by the master himself or by his followers. It is thus not surprising that the son, Jan Brueghel the Younger, harked back to a composition invented by his father to create something of his own. Throughout the composition we encounter a painter who followed the meticulous and detailed brushwork of his father’s early paintings: here, too, the self-contained foreground is covered with a canopy of foliage, opening up into the far distance on the right-hand side. The wayfarer who appears next to Abraham on his donkey and whose clothes betray him as a contemporary of Jan Brueghel accompanies the biblical protagonists, which makes him a wanderer between times.”

To corroborate his attribution to Jan Brueghel the Younger, Ertz compares the present painting, which he dates to the late 1620s, with the artist’s following autograph works:

(1) Picking Flowers (1625/30, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig);
(2) The Forest Road (1625/30, German private collection);
(3) The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1625/30, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna);
(4) Landscape with Tobit and the Angel (1630s, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg)