Landscape

Gheyn the elder, Jacob De

Summary

A reproduction produced by the Vasari Society of a drawing by Jacob de Gheyn the Elder. It is a landscape with a winding path traveling up the side of a large mountain. The path begins in the left foreground, and travels over a river (fixed on stilts) and then up the mountainside. There are houses and trees on the right and left of the path at the base of the mountain. To the right is an expanse of water with several boats and beyond that another mountain. There are people in the right foreground, on the path up the mountain and on an area of the mountain to the left. There are two figures in horseback in the left foreground. There are birds in the sky above the landscape. Text from the accompanying booklet produced by the Vasari Society: "No. 19 JACOB DE GHEYN THE ELDER (b. 1565; d. 1629) LANDSCAPE COMPOSITIONS British Museum, 1909-4-6-2. From the Lankrinck and Blofeld Collections. Pen and ink. 30.8 x 41.5 cm. (12 1/8 x 16 1/4 in.). A particularly interesting, signed and dated example of the romantic and fanciful landscape compositing which this capable painter and engraver of Antwerp was accustomed to draw with the pen, in a spirit closely imitative of the elder Bruegel. This coast scene, with its foreground village among trees and travelers crossing a torrent by a winding wooden bridge, its roads and paths leading into seemingly impenetrable fastness among precipitous cliffs surmounted by high-perched pasture-grounds and hermitages, its gallery and boats at sea and flights of birds in the sky, presents a compendium of all the elements of romance as they were conceived by the Flemish imagination towards the close of the sixteenth century. Signed, I. D. Gheyn (the three initials combined in a monogram) in. 1600. S. C."