Joachim de Patenir, who appeared in 1515, was called a landscape painter by his contemporaries, because he reduced his sacred figures to a modest size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme care.  He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was synthetical; his river valleys, with masses of tree and bush and romantic rocks, fantastic and picturesque, with fortresses on the river banks, all shew this.

Kerry de Bles was like him, but less accurate; with all the rest of the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Flanders, he did not rise to the idea of landscape as a whole.

The most minute attention was given to the accurate painting of single objects, especially plants; the Flemings caring more for perfect truth to life, the Dutch for beauty.  The Flemings generally sought to improve their landscape by embellishing its lines, while the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature.  The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are painful in their thoroughness; and Jan Brueghel carried imitation of Nature so far that his minutise required a magnifying-glass—­it was veritable miniature work.  He introduced fruit and flower painting as a new feature of art.

Rubens and Brueghel often painted on each other’s canvas, Brueghel supplying landscape backgrounds for Rubens’ pictures, and Rubens the figures for Brueghel’s landscapes.  Yet Rubens himself was the best landscapist of the Flemish school.  He was more than that.  For Brueghel and his followers, with all their patience and industry, their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature.  It was Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate independent branch of art.  They studied it in all its aspects, quiet and homely, wild and romantic, some taking one and some the other:  Rubens himself, in his large way, grasping the whole without losing sight of its parts.  They all lifted the veil from Nature and saw her as she was (Falke).

Brueghel put off the execution of a picture for which he had a commission from winter to spring, that he might study the flowers for it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to Brussels now and then to paint flowers not to be had at Antwerp.  There is a characteristic letter which he sent to the Archbishop of Milan with a picture: 

’I send your Reverence the picture with the flowers, which are all painted from Nature.  I have painted in as many as possible.  I believe so many rare and different flowers have never been painted before nor so industriously.  It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of the colours almost equal Nature.  I have painted an ornament under the flowers with artistic medallions and curiosities from the sea.  I leave it to your reverence to judge whether the flowers do not far exceed gold and jewels in colour.’