_Joachim Patinir_ (Early Flemish: died 1524). _See 715._
This picture, acquired in Florence in 1889 together with two by Zais
(1296, 1297), was for some years attributed to the Venetian school.
It is now recognised as a work of Patinir. The heavy blue tone of
that painter's distances here gives way to a lighter colour; but the
fantastic landscape has strong resemblances to No. 716. If by Patinir,
the work is unique in being one of pure landscape, with no scriptural
incident. "The earliest independent landscape that we possess by an old
master, the first admission that inanimate nature pure and simple is
worth making a picture of. In the left corner is the artist sketching,
which is a sort of guarantee that he worked in the open air, and that
he had been struck with the beauty of some such prospect.... He has
been so used to regard landscape as an accessory that he does not dare
to paint it except from a distance, or on any but a minute scale,
and he enlivens it with signs of human industry in the raft and the
limekiln. It is as though a landscape had stepped out of the background
of some old picture, and asserted its independence with fear and
trembling" (Monkhouse: _In the National Gallery_, p. 202).