Peasants on the Way to the Market
by BOECKHORST, Jan van, Oil on canvas, 218 x 272 cm
This painting with life-size figures, one of the painter’s earliest known works, clearly demonstrates Rubens’s influence on Boeckhorst. With the emphatic plasticity of the figures in the foreground, this work seems to take advantage of the taste for genre compositions executed on a monumental scale. The painting in fact can be interpreted as an allegory of the Four Elements.