Outdoor Peasant Scene - Flemish School of the17th century

Oil on canvas painting measuring 35 x 50 cm without frame and 55 x 70 cm with frame depicting an outdoor peasant scene from the Flemish school of the late 17th and early 18th century.

The painting you have asked me to examine is a painting, oil on canvas, depicting a peasant scene with a clear praise of bucolic life, typical of the modus operandi of Flemish painting following the style of Joost De Momper first up to Jan Frans Van Bloemen later

In this canvas, we immediately perceive the overflowing personality of Flemish painting that is easily understood by the traditional range of colours present here and by a clear preference for drawing where both the richness of the details and a very methodical and rational arrangement of each individual character or object emerge.

This composition, painted at the height of Flemish artistic development at the end of the 17th century, perfectly reflects the phase that painting was going through at that time somewhere between a sense of Mannerist inspiration and an adherence to the naturalistic observation that Caravaggio had developed a few years earlier.