(Antwerp 1554–1626 Rome)
Wooded landscape with hunters and anglers,
oil on canvas, 107.5 x 135 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Naples;
with Antichità Giglio, Milan;
where acquired by the present owner

The present painting can be dated to the 1590s when the Flemish painter, Paul Bril, had been in Rome for about twenty years and had achieved success and popularity among his Roman patrons due to his practice of combining Northern painterly tradition with models of Italian landscape painting.

Alongside his brother Matthijs, who was a few years older and had arrived in Rome at the beginning of the Gregorian pontificate, Paul began his work in Rome, executing works in fresco. After working on the Scala Santa in the Lateran palace, he became a point of reference for the cardinals’ patronage when it came to ‘fregi a paesi’ in Roman palaces.

One of the artist’s most significant and best-preserved undertakings in this specific genre is the cycle of landscapes interspersed with allegorical figures executed in 1599 for Cardinal Girolamo Mattei in the main hall of his palace in via delle Botteghe Oscure, Rome. Here a series of paintings show river landscapes, hunting scenes and leafy woods which can be compared to the present painting. In fact, one of Bril’s specialities at the end of the sixteenth century seems to be that of transferring the same pictorial invention into different mediums and techniques.

The wooded landscape with dense trees recalls the 1595 Landscape with a hunting scene on copper preserved in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (inv. no. 1136/1890). The inclusion of architectural structures such as those in the present painting began to appear in Bril’s drawings and paintings from the mid-1590s as can be seen in his works created for the Villa Milla and on the vault of the Gallery of the Palazzo Giustiniani.