Dutch School, ca. 1600.
"Village in a Landscape.
Oil on panel.
It has micro-cracking, but it is in very good condition.
It can make pair with the lot 35266808.
Measurements: 26 x 32,5 cm; 39,5 x 46,5 cm (frame).
Scene in which a lake landscape is presented embedded in rich autumnal shades. Compared to other European schools, Dutch painting developed an early interest in landscape painting as an independent genre. Although in the 17th century landscape painting continued to depend on genre themes, it became an undeniable protagonist, as can be seen in scenes such as the present one. The lake is impregnated with an infinite number of tonal cadences, which are jaspered with glaucous and blue tones amidst the golds that catch the last rays of a fading sun. Humble houses border the lake, with peasants in the foreground working in silence, oblivious to the viewer.
It was undoubtedly in Dutch painting that the consequences of the political emancipation of the region and the economic prosperity of the liberal bourgeoisie were most openly manifested. The combination of the discovery of nature, objective observation, the study of the concrete, the appreciation of the everyday, a taste for the real and material, and sensitivity to the apparently insignificant, meant that the Dutch artist was at one with the reality of everyday life, without seeking any ideals that were alien to that same reality. The painter did not seek to transcend the present and the materiality of objective nature or to escape from tangible reality, but to envelop himself in it, to become intoxicated by it through the triumph of realism, a realism of pure illusory fiction, achieved thanks to a perfect, masterly technique and a conceptual subtlety in the lyrical treatment of light. As a result of the break with Rome and the iconoclastic tendency of the Reformed Church, paintings with religious themes were eventually eliminated as a decorative complement with a devotional purpose, and mythological stories lost their heroic and sensual tone in accordance with the new society. Portraits, landscapes and animals, still lifes and genre painting were the thematic formulas that became valuable in their own right and, as objects of domestic furniture - hence the small size of the paintings - were acquired by individuals from almost all social classes and classes of society.