Village Landscape with Figures and Cows

Brueghel guides the viewer’s eye from a tree-covered hill into the river landscape opening out below, using darker colours to express the shady section in the foreground. On this small copper panel, dated 1609, he portrays in fine detail the everyday life of a rural community.
Villagers go about their work along the river bank, carrying goods over the bridge on their backs or in baskets. A woman is tending a kitchen garden surrounded by a wooden fence, while another looks after children.
On the opposite bank, three figures stand in conversation. They are not villagers; the style of their dress shows them to be town-dwellers – and the silhouette of a town can be distinguished in the blue of the background.
The river changes from dark blue in the shade to light blue showing reflections in the sun. Brueghel’s work includes a whole group of such idyllic landscapes, his figures set with a delicate hand in natural surroundings, here once more rendered as a “world landscape”. His equal treatment of the staffage figures is noticeable; their social status is recognisable only by the black garb with ruff and hat for the town-dwellers and earthy shades with blue, white and pink for the villagers.
This work shows an extremely rare representation of a peasant’s garden in the 16th and 17th centuries.

DUCKE Astrid: Brueghel Jan the Elder, Village scene with figures and cows, in: DUCKE Astrid, HABERSATTER Thomas, OEHRING Erika: Masterworks. Residenzgalerie Salzburg. Salzburg 2015, p. 72