Paul Bril

Variant namesprimary name: Paul Bril name variant: Paulus Bril name variant: Paulo Brilli name variant: Paul Briel name variant: Paullebrille name variant: Pietro Brille name variant: Pablo Brie name variant: Pauolo Brillo name variant: Paul Brill

DatesBiographical dates: 1554 - 1626 Dead: dead 1626-10-07 Born: born 1554

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BiographyBiography: Landscape painter, draughtsman and printmaker. The son of the painter Matthijs Bril I and brother of the painter Matthijs Bril II, Paul was one of the most gifted and influential landscape painters of his time. According to Van Mander (1604), Paul studied at Antwerp with Damiaen Wortelmans, before travelling to Rome, via Lyon, ca.1574. Reaching Rome by 1582, Paul joined his elder brother Matthijs, whom, according to Baglione (1642), he assisted in painting decorative landscape frescoes in the Vatican Palace. In 1582 he joined the Roman Accademia di San Luca, of which he was subsequently named principe (president) in 1620. Paul was able to capitalize on contacts with influential individuals that had already been established by his brother and these initial contacts served him well throughout his career. After Matthijs’ premature death in 1583, Paul succeeded him on many papal commissions both in the Vatican and in various churches and villas in and around Rome. Unlike the majority of travelling artists, particularly landscape specialists, he enjoyed a steady patronage of popes, members of the curia and the Roman aristocracy, as well as wealthy Northern merchants. His work was avidly collected by such patrons as Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Milan, Cardinal Carlo de’Medici in Florence and Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga in Mantua. Apart from a possible visit to Naples c.1602–1603, he spent the remainder of his life in Rome. Paul’s first known independent works are monumental frescoes, from the late 1580s, in the Scala Santa of the Vatican and in the Lateran Palace. Among his important early commissions were a fresco cycle of c. 1599 in S. Cecilia in Trastevere, depicting hermit saints praying in wooded landscapes, and a monumental seascape, the Martyrdom of St. Clement of c. 1600–1602/1603, painted together with the brothers Giovanni and Cherubino Alberti, in the Vatican Palace’s Sala Clementina for Pope Clement VIII. In the 1590s, he also began painting small-sized landscapes, on copper and canvas, for private collectors, often depicting subjects that he and his brother had rendered earlier on a monumental scale: tempestuous seascapes; hermits in the wilderness; travelling pilgrims; hunters and fishermen; Roman townscapes with ancient ruins. The landscapes from his early period derive their vocabulary largely from the Netherlandish tradition inaugurated by Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel I. After c. 1600, influenced by the German painter Adam Elsheimer, whom he befriended in Rome around 1600, and by Annibale Carracci and his followers, Bril gradually discarded the typical Mannerist stylizations of the late 16th century for the more naturalistic and balanced compositions of the emergent Baroque. His works from this period have lower horizons and flatter, less abrupt transitions from foreground to background through gently rising diagonals and a more subtle rendering of light. They often contain pastoral or bucolic figures and settings and mythological subjects. Among the community of foreign landscape artists working in Rome in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Bril became a pivotal figure. Financial security allowed him to establish a large workshop, which became the focal point of contact and potential employment for other Northern artists in Rome. Bril’s landscapes had a deep and lasting effect on his pupils and followers, including Willem van Nieulandt II, Agostino Tassi, Cornelis van Poelenburch and Claude Lorrain.

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