Water (The Four Elements)

The Four Elements series was the Brueghel workshop's most celebrated product, and Water — with its opportunity to display fish, shells, river gods, and aquatic landscape — was typically the most elaborate panel in the set. Jan Brueghel the Younger returned to this subject repeatedly in the 1640s and 1650s, producing versions on copper for the cabinet market. Water allowed him to combine still-life skill (shells, fish) with landscape painting (harbours, rivers, storms) and mythological figuration (Neptune, nereids). The element also carried cosmological significance in Baroque thought as one of the four primary constituents of the created world, lending an encyclopaedic and quasi-scientific character to what was also a spectacular decorative object. Copper's reflective ground was particularly appropriate for a subject centred on reflective water.

Copper support intensifies the cool blues and silvers appropriate to the water theme. Shells and fish in the foreground receive miniaturist attention to surface texture. Background maritime scenes — ships, harbours — are handled in atmospheric perspective with a characteristically hazy horizon.