Landscape with Travellers

Landscape with Travellers, undated and on copper at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, represents a distilled version of Jan Brueghel's road-landscape formula: a group of travellers on a path through open countryside, the landscape expanding around them into a wide, atmospheric horizon. The copper support dates this to his preferred medium, likely the 1600s–15s. The Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, with its collection of British and European paintings, holds a number of smaller-format works that entered through the eighteenth-century collecting enthusiasm of Bath's wealthy visitor population. Traveller landscapes served both as vicarious tourism — the collector experiencing a journey through the picture — and as Stoic moral reflections on the journey of life.

Oil on copper; Brueghel's traveller groups are typically rendered at a scale that allows individual posture and purpose to be read clearly while the landscape dominates the composition. The warm, atmospheric light of the middle ground and horizon is built up with very thin, transparent glazes over the warm copper ground.