Landscape with a Barn and a Road

Although inspired by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the subject and handling of this drawing supports an attribution of the work to Cornelis Vroom, who emerged from the stimulating milieu of early marine painting to become one of the most influential artists of the first phase of the Dutch seventeenth-century landscape genre. Around 1620 Vroom abandoned the marine painting tradition in which he was trained by his father to join a group of young Haarlem artists whose drawings pioneered a new realistic style of landscape images.