Flemish school; XVIII century."Landscape".Oil on canvas. Relined.Damage in the upper left corner.Measurements: 91 x 108 cm; 114 x 129 cm (frame).The author structures this scene based on successive planes that provide a great depth to the scene. An image in which dominates a gloomy landscape composed with dark tonalities very typical of the Flemish palette. In the scene dominated by the landscape, the author articulates a series of elements that bring dynamism to the scene, an example of this is the presence of the characters crossing the bridge, located in the lower right area or the buildings that are located in the last planes. It is remarkable the way in which the figures are treated, whose clothes show a movement caused by the wind, thus providing an atmospheric conception to the image.Like other genres that acquired great popularity during the 17th century in Flanders, landscape painting has its roots in the Dutch pictorial tradition of the 15th 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.