“I would like to step out of my heart

and go walking beneath the enormous sky.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Paul Bril’s landscapes are the link between the Northern Renaisssance style of landscape painting that was created by Joachim Patinir and Peter Breugel, and the more classical, idealized later Italian landscapes of Claude Lorraine Nicolas Poussin. He was born in Antwerp but travelled to Italy to train, where he became friends with Jan Brueghel the elder (the rebellious Brueghel), was commissioned to work on several rooms in the Vatican, and, eventually, was elected to become the director of the Rome academy of art.

Paintings by Paul Bril (Flemish, 1554-1626)