Paul Bril (Antwerp 1554-1626 Rome)

One of the most influential landscape painters of his time, Paul Bril trained in Antwerp with the unknown Damiaen Ortelmans, and supported himself as a teenager by painting landscapes on harpsichords. He travelled to Rome in 1576 where he joined his elder brother Matthijs in painting frescoes in the Vatican and other churches and palaces, and succeeded him on several Papal commissions after Matthijs's premature death in 1583. It was not until the 1590s that Bril began to paint the jewel-like cabinet pictures on panel and copper which were as famed at that time as they are today - his clients ranged from the Barberini family in Rome, to collectors in the Netherlands such as the merchant Hendrick van Os, mentioned by Karel van Mander in his Schilderboeck of 1604.
Bril's work is firmly rooted in the Flemish landscape tradition of Patinir, Herri met de Bles and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Indeed, these two pendants are some of the first examples in Bril's oeuvre of an agricultural subject associated with the seasons, which had been popularised in the preceding years by Pieter Bruegel and his followers, and which would become a predominant theme for later Flemish artists also working in Italy. The attention to minute detail and the diffusion of light throughout these compositions is typical of Bril's work at this time. Their circular shape and the date of 1598 also links these coppers to the series of seasons executed between 1599 and 1601, which are today in the Institut Néerlandais, Paris (Attraverso il Cinquecento neerlandese: Disegni della collezione Frits Lugt, Paris and Florence, 1980-1981, pp. 46-48, nos. 31-4).