The Marketplace in Bergen op Zoom

Seen from slightly above, the cobbled market square of a Flemish town swarms with townsfolk in cloaks and ruffs — merchants at their stalls, couples strolling, a drummer with his strap raised — while stepped gables line the square and a stone church tower rises above the roofs, the dates 1590 and 1597 painted on the façades themselves. Abel Grimmer, the Antwerp painter of townscapes and calendar scenes, built this meticulous panorama of Bergen op Zoom about 1590-1597 in the tradition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: the figures are tiny but each is individually posed, the market’s bustle is rendered with a chronicler’s delight, and beyond the rooftops a green hill with a fortress and a winding waterway opens the square onto the wide landscape. The panel is a rare early Netherlandish cityscape of a town that no longer keeps its sixteenth-century form. It was given to the National Gallery of Art in 1979 by Mr. and Mrs. Earl H. Look. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.