Flemish school of the 18th century.

Flemish school of the 18th century.
"Landscape with figures".
Provenance: Apartment palace belonging to a family of the Catalan bourgeoisie of long tradition.
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It has slight losses.
This lot makes set with the 35353924.
Measurements: 55 x 72 cm; 77 x 94 cm (frame).

Like other genres that acquired great popularity during the XVII century in Flanders, the landscape painting has its roots in the pictorial tradition of the Netherlands of the XV century. The background landscapes of the religious works of Van Eyck, de Bouts or van der Goes occupy a much more important place in them as an artistic element than that occupied by the landscape in Italian painting of the same period. As far as the representation of the narrative is concerned, the landscape of the Flemish primitives plays an essential role, not only as the natural environment of the characters but also to separate and set the various episodes of the story narrated in the work. As for the imitation of nature, the Flemish painters of the 15th century tried to represent in a plausible way in the landscapes of their religious paintings the fields and cities of their native country, detailing their flora with botanical precision and even giving an idea of the time of day and the season of the year in which the scene takes place. This special interest in the representation of the landscape increased as the 16th century progressed, when a new type of landscape for sacred scenes was developed and popularized: the panoramic view. Very soon, however, it was the representation of the landscape itself that was to receive the attention of painters and, of course, of the public. In the panoramic views of Joachim Patinir and his followers the roles are reversed: the religious subject is an excuse for the landscape. In these paintings the landscape becomes completely independent of any narrative, and this is the direction that the Flemish and Dutch painters of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were to follow, a time when landscape painting acquired great popularity in the Netherlands and specialists in the genre began to proliferate. Gillis van Coninxloo, Paul Bril, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Joos de Momper are the most distinguished landscape painters of the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, and each of them imprinted their vision of the landscape with a very personal stamp.