Landscape with Men Playing 'Mail à la Chicane'

Paul Bril was born into a family of artists in Antwerp, now the second-largest city in Belgium. Around 1580, he moved permanently to Rome, where he worked initially as a fresco painter in the Vatican. Gradually, he shifted from the Flemish painting traditions of his homeland to more classical compositions, filled with ruins and bucolic figures and imbued with a calmer, pastoral sentiment. These idealized landscapes made him famous and profoundly influenced Claude Lorrain, a French painter who moved to Rome around the time of Bril’s death, in 1626, and became the quintessential landscape painter of his time.