Landscape with hermit
1596
Medium
oil on copper
Measurements
17.2 × 22.7 cm
Credit Line
Bequest of Robert Victor Jones, 2026
Gallery location
17th Century & Flemish Paintings Gallery
Level 2, NGV International
About this work
This is one of a group of bravura small-scale landscape paintings on panel and copper that Paul Bril painted in Rome in the 1590s. Paul and his older brother Matthijs may have initially been trained by their painter father Matthijs Bril the Elder in Antwerp, before moving to Rome – Matthijs around 1575 and Paul around 1582. At the end of the 1590s Paul Bril was commissioned to paint a fresco cycle in Rome’s church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, which he decorated with lush landscape scenes in the Flemish tradition, depicting hermit saints praying in the wilderness. This minutely detailed landscape scene reflects this series in
miniature.