Wooded Landscape with Abraham and Isaac

This work depicts a wooded landscape and was created in Jan's early period, when he had begun painting activities in his own country after returning from his Italian sojourn. Here the wooded scene is used as the setting for the tale of Abraham and Isaac, as they headed towards Moriah. There Abraham, seen on a donkey, intended to sacrifice his only son according to God's will. In the instant before Abraham was going to kill Isaac, an angel appeared and ordered Abraham to stop. In this painting, Isaac is shown gathering firewood for his own sacrificial pyre. Two of the surrounding five figures are woodcutters. The wooded area is divided into sections by the differences in the clarity of the light seen in each area. The scene is made up of three sections, the foreground woods which are dark, the brightly lit middle ground around the small stream, and the distance glimpsed between the trees. The wooded scene is shown in intricate and accurately realistic detail, forming a contrast with the hazily rendered, non-realistic depiction of the far distance. Such depiction is more reminiscent of realistic 17th-century Dutch landscapes than the traditional world view landscapes of Flemish painting. The inclusion of ancillary figures in an expansive landscape to transform an ordinary landscape painting into a painting with a Biblical theme was a characteristic form of Flemish landscape painting. However, the characteristic form was not simply a stage setting for the narrative, it too was imbued with symbolic meaning. The subject of Abraham and Isaac, from the medieval period onwards, was seen as a typology of the Crucifixion, and it is possible that here the landscape scene has some symbolic meaning related to the subject. However, on the other hand, the wooded scene shown here was used again by Jan in his The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1607, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). In spite of the fact that the woods, cut off from everyday life, might somehow represent a sacred space, it seems that Jan made very little connection between the landscape motifs and each individual Biblical scene he placed in them. This painting is a superb example of the wooded scenery that became an important painting genre in Netherlandish painting from the 16th century through the 17th century. (Source: Masterpieces of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2009, cat. no. 38)