Landscape with Castellated Village in Background

Framed: 20 x 23 inches (51 x 89.5 cm)

Willem Von Nienenlandt was the brother of Adrien I and Jacob Von Nienenlandt. He was living in Rome by the time he was eighteen with his uncle Willem I on the Via Paolina, near Via Margutta, in the company of such painters as Abraham, Janseens, Justus de Mol and the apprentice Gillis Liebart.
Willem was the student of Paul Bril for about a year, according to Van Mander, but his work was considered less constrained than Bril’s, with fewer contrasts and more spontaneity. By the age of twenty-two he was living in Amsterdam where he married. It was said of him that he “naturally” adopted the style of his master. In 1605, he returned to Antwerp, although he spent the last six years of his life again in Amsterdam. In Antwerp, where he lived between 1606-1629 he was a draughtsman and editor, producing more than one hundred fourteen prints, which were reissued in Paris. In Antwerp he became a member of a rhetoric chamber: the Olijftak. He wrote many tragedies and was one of the most important representatives of the Seneca classical tradition.

He painted and drew architectural monuments, ruins, and sites. His backgrounds open to vast, low horizons, which he used in many of his works with a precise and detailed drawing style. Many of his drawings done in the Netherlands were based on the material he gathered in Italy and his earlier studies. He was fond of assembling different architectural motifs to give a noble focus to the background of a drawing, such as seen on this sheet, which dates to the 1620s.