A rocky coastal landscape with figures on the shore and a moored galley

A variant, also on copper, of similar size, and also formerly attributed to Paul Bril, was included in the exhibition, Brueghel. Une dynastie de peintres, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 18 September-18 November 1980, no. 106, illustrated, as an early work by Jan Breughel the Elder, executed in Italy in circa 1592. Dr. Margarita Russell, however, believes the exhibited picture and the present lot to have been painted by the Leiden artist Cornelis Liefrinck II (Russell, op. cit., p. 177, nos. 28 and 29 respectively), and relates them to a signed painting by his father Hans Liefrinck (ibid, p. 176, no. 29).