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PAUL BRIL (Antwerp c. 1554 – 1626 Rome) A Landscape with a Hunting Party and Roman Ruins On canvas, 27¾ x 38 ¾ ins. (70.5 x 98.4 cm) Provenance: The Duke of Sutherland, Dunrobin Castle, by 1921 By whom sold, Christie’s, London, 29 November 1957, lot 31 Where purchased by Thos. Agnew & Sons, London Denys Sutton (1917-1991), London Thence by descent to the previous owner Exhibited: Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd., London, 1958 Ideal & Classical Landscape, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 6 February – 3 April 1960, cat. no. 18 L’Ideale classico del Seicento in Italia e la pittura di paesaggio, Bologna, 8 September – 11 November, 1962, cat. no. 124 Literature: The Duke of Sutherland, Dunrobin Castle Catalogue, 1921, no. 253 Art News, April 1958, vol. 57, no. 2, p. 4 (reproduced) F. Cappelletti, Paul Bril, et la pittura di paesaggio a Roma 1580- 1630, Rome, 2005, p. 304, cat. no. 166 (reproduced) Note: We are grateful to Drs. Luuk Pijl for confirming the attribution to Bril, based on photographs. Drs. Pijl dates the work to between 1617-1620 and will include it in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Paul Bril’s paintings. VP4601 Paul Bril trained in Antwerp before making his way to Italy sometime before 1582. In Rome, he joined his older brother Matthijs (c. 1550-83), who was already established in the employment of Pope Gregory XIII, producing fresco decorations for the Vatican. Initially, Paul assisted his brother, but after Matthijs’s premature death in 1583, he assumed responsibility for the papal commissions both in the Vatican and in various churches and villas in and around Rome. In addition to these major projects, from about 1590 onwards, Bril began to produce cabinet-sized landscape paintings on copper or panel for private patrons. These early works are firmly rooted in the Antwerp landscape tradition and typically feature a high viewpoint, sheer rocky outcrops, miniaturist detail and a stylised colour scheme. After 1600, under the influence of the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) and his Italian followers, Bril’s work in fresco gradually evolved from a characteristically mannerist vision towards a simpler and more classically organised landscape style. His horizons became lower, the transitions from foreground to background less abrupt and his colours more naturalistic. A similar transformation also occurred in his easel paintings during the first decade of the seventeenth century. This new approach may have been inspired in part by the small, innovative landscapes of the German painter Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610), a close friend and neighbour of Bril in Rome. Characteristic of Bril’s late work, this painting depicts a scene in the Roman campagna. The broad expanse of landscape is dotted with classical ruins and populated by groups of small, lively figures. In the left foreground, hunters, with their dogs, rest in the shade of some trees while they review the spoils of the day. On the right, some local boys are busy trapping birds: an owl has been tethered to a perch in order to lure smaller birds to the snares set up in the surrounding vegetation. Two of the boys watch from their hide in the nearby ruins, while the others count their catch. On the grassy slopes in the sunny mid-distance, a herdsman tends his animals. A central vista offers a prospect of distant blue lakes, plains and rolling hills. The composition is relatively simple and organised with great clarity. Using a clump of trees on the left and the mass of ruined buildings on the right to frame the scene, the artist has constructed a succession of overlapping diagonal planes that leads the eye from the foreground into the distance. This spatial recession is further suggested by alternating zones of dark and light. Although the traditional mannerist division of the landscape into three bands of colour (brown, green, blue) is still apparent here, the transitions from one to another flow more gently and the whole is unified by a soft greenish light. The artist’s technique for evoking a feeling of depth in his landscapes was described by Edward Norgate, an English painter and theoretician who visited Bril in Rome in 1622. “Yet one generall rule I had from my old friend, Paolo Brill, which hee said will make a Landscape “Caminare”, that is to move or walke away, and that is by placing Darke against Light, and light against Darke. His meaning is best understood by Circumlocution, viz. that part of your Landscape soever is light, the next adjacent ground to be proportionably darke, or shadowed, and that again second with light and then shady againe, till you come to the nearest ground, where all ends with strong and dark shadowes, to sett of all the rest”i. Also characteristic of the late phase of Bril’s activity is the larger size and canvas support. Although Bril rarely signed and dated his work on this scale, a comparison with the few known dated examples indicates that the present painting can be situated in the period between 1617 and 1620. For example, it may be compared with the larger Landscape with the Road to Emmaus, dated 1617, in the Louvreii, or the Landscape with Hare Coursing and a Plowman, of 1620, in the Ponce Museum of Art, in Puerto Ricoiii. A copy of the present work, on panel, was sold at Sotheby’s in London on 11 December 1996iv. Although traditionally thought to be a native of Antwerp, Paul Bril was actually born in Breda in 1553 or 1554. He was the son of the landscape painter, Matthijs Bril the Elder (active c. 1550) and younger brother of the painter and draughtsman, Matthijs Bril the Younger (c. 1550- 83). Bril first studied in Antwerp with his father and then, according to Karel van Mander, with the otherwise unknown Damiaen Ortelmans. In around 1575 he travelled to Rome to join his brother Matthijs, where he is first documented in 1582, the year he joined the Accademia di San Luca. Apart from a brief visit to Naples, he remained in Rome for the rest of his life, living first on the Via Paolina (now Via del Babuino) and then on the Via San Sebastianello, near the Piazza di Spagna. In 1619, he married Octavia Sbarra and the couple had three children, a daughter and two sons. In 1620, Bril was the first Flemish artist to be elected principe of the Accademia di San Luca. He died in Rome on 7 October 1626 and was buried in the church of Sta. Maria dell’Anima. P.M. i Written in 1627-8; see Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell, Miniatura or the Art of Limning by Edward Norgate, London and New Haven, 1997, p. 5. Quoted in the exhibition catalogue, Inspired by Italy, by Laurie Harwood, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002, p. 16. ii Paul Bril, Landscape with the Road the Emmaus, signed and dated 1617, on canvas, 95 x 142 cm, Palais du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 1121. iii Paul Bril, Landscape with Hare Coursing and a Plowman, signed and dated 1620, on canvas, 66 x 88.5 cm, Ponce Museum of Art, Puerto Rico, Fundacion Luis A. Ferre, inv. no. 61-0173. iv After Paul Bril, A Landscape with Classical Ruins and Bird-catchers, on panel, 48.5 x 71.6 cm, Sotheby’s, London, 11 December 1996, Lot 288. .

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