Possibly by Marten Rijckaert, Landscape with Satyrs

This tiny jewel of a picture was made at a time when landscape painting was beginning to be appreciated as an important genre of its own. But although no longer a poor relation of pictures of great historical events or of stories from the Bible or Greek myths and legend, it was common for landscape painters of Rijckaert’s era to include figures from these myths to give their paintings gravitas.

The artist chooses satyrs as his mythical creatures, demigods of the woods and forests. They‘re half goat and half man, with hooves and shaggy legs, horns and hairy ears. Satyrs were followers of Dionysus, the god of wine, and were fertility symbols, notorious for drunkenness, lust, chasing nymphs and loud partying. The artist shows these rumbustious characters in a quieter moment, returning from their revels. He keeps them no bigger than a bee’s wing, so as to give the landscape full scope.

The chief satyr stands on a rock, summoning his brothers home with a blast from a horn. Another stands on a hillock opposite him, apparently chewing on leaves. Three more wade through the stream towards the horn blower, one leaning on a stick, the other two staggering in a wobbly-looking piggyback – perhaps it was too good a night out. Their slow and precarious progress hardly disturbs the jaunty, cartoon-like ducks, splashing in a pool.

To reach their den under the high rock, the satyrs must stumble across the waterfall that spurts out from the cliff, giving the picture movement and sparkle. Here, there’s a break from tradition. Satyrs in Greek art were depicted as uniformly and noticeably male, with magnified erect penises, but the artist paints a female satyr reclining under the cliff. She has twin babies tucked under one arm, another child standing beside her and a full belly, a miniature but unmistakable symbol of fertility.

The docile goat on the cliff top, chewing on leaves like the satyr below, points up the bestiality of these creatures – sated for the moment, but gathering strength for the next revels. The figures intrigue us, but a triangle formed by the goat and the three satyrs beneath leads the eye up to the rocks, cliffs and trees. These are likely to have been a large part of the point of his picture, a background to the classical story but still dominant.

Because of its size and because it is painted on wood, the painting may once have been part of a piece of furniture, a chest perhaps. Broad downward brushstrokes give a rough texture to the grey cliff face below the goat, and contrast with the feathery lightness of the countless greens of the rustling leaves. The heavily-laden, end-of-summer trees on the hillside lean over as if they might slip down the steep slope into the water below, adding more movement to the scene, and to the unsteadiness of the satyrs’ wild, self-indulgent world.