| Description |
The painter and draughtsman son of Pieter Brueghel I, Jan is famous for his small-scale history paintings, some of which were executed on copper, exquisite flower still-lifes, allegorical and mythological scenes and various types of landscapes, including imaginary mountain scenes and country roads, ports, river views, seascapes, hunting pieces, battles and scenes of Hell and the underworld. Unlike his brother Pieter the younger, Jan did not merely imitate his father. His early compositions show transformations of his father's style into his own delicate miniaturist idiom. Many of Jan's early landscapes are painted from a high vantage-point (bird's eye perspective) as is the case with the Salford work. He probably operated a workshop comparable in size to that of Rubens (with whom he often collaborated), which would help to explain the more than 3,000 paintings attributed to him. However, of these probably only 450 can be correctly attributed to Jan and of these at least 58 are collaborative works with Joos de Momper. His reputation as 'Velvet Brueghel', 'Paradise Brueghel' or 'Flower Brueghel' was firmly established in his day and he and Rubens were described in 1614 by the chronicler, Johann Wilhelm Neumayr, as the two most prominent painters in the city of Antwerp. |
