This remarkable album, likely assembled in Antwerp just after 1600, contains within it both the past and the future of landscape art at the hinge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a gathering of various works, in various styles, made from around 1560 to 1580 by some of the leading figures in Flemish landscape painting and printmaking. Some of their names are known: Hans Bol, Adriaen Collaert, Jacob Grimmer. But the name of the most important, the most influential, and the one whose works dominate this album, has eluded scholars for more than two centuries. The artist is known simply as the Master of the Small Landscapes, and has been associated with figures are varied as Cornelis Cort, Hiernonymus Cock, Hans Bol, and even Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

During the early and middle decades of the century, landscape painters, and the printmakers with whom they worked, tended to look at the land from on high. They depicted the world as if from the air or on a mountaintop, with land and water rippling away to the horizon, suffused with light, and filled with incident. In keeping with sixteenth-century tastes, the landscapes often provided a setting for a story from ancient mythology or the Bible, played out by tiny figures tucked into the fields or woods. This album contains several dozen of the finest of such prints, designed by Hans Bol, in magnificent impressions that capture the dazzling light of the sun-filled sky in mere black and white.

But in the 1550s, another artist, the Master of the Small Landscapes, came abruptly down to earth, making a series of small, elegant drawings of the distinctly inelegant landscape in and around Brussels. Flat and wet and muddy, and filled not with ancient heroes, but farmers, cattle, and waterfowl, these landscapes are drawn from a human perspective, and from a point of view just a few feet off the ground—in other words eye level. In 1559 and 1560, the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock issued prints of 44 of those landscape drawings, though without identifying the artist. The works were not especially influential to begin with, but their influence grew, and in 1602 Cock’s successor, Philips Galle, reissued the prints; those are the versions in this album.

The artist of these closely observed scenes of everyday life in Flanders was prescient. The low point of view, the emphasis on the mundane, and the celebration of the familiar became a hallmark of landscape art in the decades to follow, though, interestingly, the style was far more influential in the northern Netherlands than in Flanders itself. In fact, in 1612, Claes Jansz. Visscher issued a set of copies of these works, but in Amsterdam, not Antwerp. That set served as a spur to artists in all media in Holland and the other provinces of the north.

Despite that influence, the artist responsible for these works eludes identification. Hans Bol has long been seen as a candidate, both for the drawings and the prints themselves, but that idea is far from universally accepted. The fact that nearly all of the other works in this album are in one way or another tied to Bol is a tantalizing hint. Perhaps the person who assembled the album knew something that we don’t.

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