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| Title | Hilly landscape with a shepherd and cattle by a stream | |
| Collection | Southampton City Art Gallery | |
| Artist | Bril, Paul (Flemish landscapist and fresco painter, 1554-1626, active in Rome) | |
| Date | 1619 (dated) | |
| Signed | yes | |
| Description | Paul Bril (1553/4-1626) only began to paint on canvas late in his career to satisfy the increasing demand for large landscape paintings to decorate the high walls of Roman palaces, where they were usually hung above the wainscot. Hilly landscape with a shepherd and cattle by a stream is typical of these works and it is signed with a visual pun of a pair of spectacles, the word for which is ‘Bril' in Dutch, and dated 1619. The composition is divided into three bands of colour: brown in the foreground, green in the middle-ground and blue in the background; this is a convention of the Antwerp school of landscape painting that Bril never fully shed. The gently rolling hills are an idealised interpretation of the Roman Campagna, while the insertion of the trees on the left is entirely for picturesque effect. In the foreground, the pastoral figure of the herdsman dressed in red, is intended to draw our eye to the gently meandering river that forms the bridge between the various parts of the composition. This type of decorative landscape influenced a whole generation of painters working in Rome, notably Agostino Tassi (1580-1644), the teacher of Claude Lorrain (1604/5-1682). | |
| Current Accession Number | SCAG 9/1967 | |
| Inscription | front lc '[signed with a spectacle] 1619' | |
| Subject | landscape; figure | |
| Measurements | 103.0 x 148.7 cm cm (estimate) | |
| Material | oil on canvas | |
| Acquisition Details | Purchased from Colnaghi's, London, 1967 for £5,900 (Chipperfield Fund) with a 50% Government Grant through the Victoria and Albert Museum. | |
| Provenance | Mrs H. M. Price, from whom purchased by Colnaghi's, London, 1967. | |
| Principal Exhibitions | Paintings by Old Masters, Colnaghi's, London, 1967, cat. no. 25. | |
| Publications | Wright, C., Old Master Paintings in Britain, London, 1976, p. 96; Luckett, H., Landscapes: An Anthology from Southampton Art Gallery, 1979, no. 7, ill.; Southampton Art Gallery, Illustrated Inventory of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 1980, p. 17; Pijl, L., ‘Paul Bril', Allgemeine Künstler-Lexikon, vol. 14, Leipzig, 1996, p. 229; Wright, C., Renaissance to Impressionism: Masterpieces from Southampton City Art Gallery, London, 1998, p. 84, no. 8, ill. p. 38. | |
| Notes | Paul Bril (1553/4-1626) studied in his native Antwerp; c. 1575 he followed his brother Matthijs Bril (1550-1583) to Rome where they collaborated on several monumental fresco cycles. Paul Bril began painting small landscapes on panel and copper during the 1590s; these works gained him considerable success. The earliest of them are characterised by strong contrasts of form such as cliffs and plains, and by sharply divided areas of light and shade that create dramatic motion. After about 1605 the style of Bril's works tends towards a calmer, more classicising mode, perhaps influenced by Annibale Carracci, with whom Bril collaborated. In these later works light is treated more subtly, horizons tend to be low and the transition from foreground to background rendered gently; his religious and mythological subjects are usually accompanied by pastoral or bucolic figures and settings, instead of the tempestuous scenery of his earlier works. | |
| Rights Owner | Southampton City Art Gallery | |
| Author | Francesco Nevola | |