Jan Brueghel the Elder, 'Landscape with Travellers and Peasants on a Track', 1610

This small picture was made to entertain. In a world without television or cinema, a picture full of incident was a diversion and a topic for conversation and debate. Four hundred years after it was painted, it still works its spell.

A party of peasants takes advantage of a patch of sunshine to dance to the music of a violin. They caper and stamp with more energy than refinement. Skirts and aprons swing and sway, hands clasp and faces smile.

The dancers catch the attention of the driver and passengers in the first of a train of weighty wagons trundling down the hillside, and of a group of travellers taking a rest at the side of the track. A grandmother sits perhaps with her daughter, grandchild and a servant. Her costume and headdress suggest that grandmama is well-to-do, but she still wears the wide ruff that was fashionable years before.

The hillside is busy with figures, each telling a story. An old man with a stick walks with the help of his family. A man wakes up at the noise, clutching his possibly sore head. Dogs run and bark. Sheep and cows feed on sparse tussocks of grass. Animal bones lie unobserved on the ground. Sunlight on the river catches the eye, where a jetty juts out to meet a bridge to the far bank. With tiny smudges of paint, Jan Brueghel shows two fishermen sitting on the wall, one with a fishing line like a cobweb reflected in the water.

On the far bank, trees are beginning to turn yellow and a gothic building with an ornate turret stands proud. Here and there the trees give way to open grassland and the roofs of houses begin to emerge. Almost hidden is a small building, perhaps a fishing lodge, so close to the river that it almost appears to be standing in the water.

The painting was made when Brueghel was experimenting with aerial perspective. The artist depicted distance through the gradation of colour and by the size of objects. He spaced vivid red and blue garments across the base of the image to add brightness but also to bring the figures wearing them close to us. The tawny brown hillside and the green woods across the river take us further away. The green gives way to the misty blue and grey of the vast distance, culminating in glimpses of water that define the horizon from the clouds overhead. Brueghel was a friend of Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens used aerial perspective in his great landscape A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (National Gallery, London).

Brueghel also used a loose form of one-point perspective. In this method, two diagonal lines meet at a single point, giving the illusion of distance on a flat surface. The sloping hillsides converge to draw the eye to the two towers far away, subtly helped by the tops of two trees, one directly in front of the other, leading to the tallest tower.