Paul Bril was born in 1554 in Antwerp, where he also received his artistic training. In 1574 he journeyed to Lyon and on to Rome, where his brother Matthäus was already living as a painter. In Rome he received a number of commissions for landscape frescoes, for the Lateran Palace, for example, and the Scala Santa and Scala Clementina in the Vatican. Around 1600 he met Adam Elsheimer. Bril combined northern and southern artistic concepts, and much like Elsheimer contributed greatly to a revival of landscape painting in the early seventeenth century. He died in Rome in 1626.
