The date on this panel is difficult to read, making it impossible to decide whether the work was painted in Rome or immediately after the artist’s return to Utrecht. The particular imagery here – disporting nymphs and satyrs against a sun-baked landscape – may also reflect the impact of Titian’s Este Bacchanals, the Bacchanale of the Andrians and Putti in Front of a Statue of Venus (both Prado, Madrid, and Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London), which were brought to Rome by Cardinal Aldobrandini in 1598. There is a close relationship, perhaps disguised by the artists’ subsequent careers, between this work and the early mythologies of Nicolas Poussin, who arrived in Rome in 1624 and was similarly impressed with Titian’s Bacchanals.

This sort of idealised mythological landscape remained in fashion for at least a hundred years, with an artist such as Gerard Hoet 1648-1733 creating similar imagery throughout his career. In the chapter on landscape in his Inleyding of 1678, Hoogstraten endorses this species of landscape, urging artists to show him the enchanted wood penetrated by Tasso’s Rinaldo, the home of the blessed in the Elysian Fields, as sung by the poets, the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly and the hunting grounds of Arcadia.

Poelenburgh (1586-1667) retains his love of fantastical forms in the outcrop to the right-hand side and enjoys the rhyme in colour and shape between these rocks and the suntanned torsos of the satyrs. Is he suggesting that seeing mythology might be the result of a trick of the light exacerbated by sun-stroke on a hot Roman hillside?

Inscribed: 'C. P. F. 1624 [or 7]'

The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated Royal Residences of 1819, hanging in the King's Writing Closet at Hampton Court Palace (RCIN 922133).

Text adapted from Dutch Landscapes, London, 2010