Landscape by Paul Bril

I am just doing some filing of old articles and came across some about the landscape painter Paul Bril (c.1554-1626). I worked on him years back in undergrad in a subject where we looked at sixteenth and seventeenth century landscapes as a way of learning about connoisseurship and attribution. Shortly after it ended I went off to London for a few months and had great delight in my new found ability to spot a Paul Bril without reading the label. The paintings are typically small landscapes on copper and have a jewel-like quality. Oil paint on copper tends to hold its colour well so the blues and greens of landscapes are usually brighter than similar works on canvas. Here is a landscape, now at the National Gallery of Scotland, simply titled 'Fantastic Landscape', in reference to the fantastical nature of the scene depicted, but also possibly because it is bloody brilliant, hah. It was painted after Bril's arrival in Rome but the scenery depicted is reminscent of Netherlands where he was born, the rocky outcrops in particular, as well as fragments of ruin common to Italian landscapes. Image courtesy of the National Gallery Scotland, link to painting here.