Paul Bril completed this commission in the Vatican Palace's Sala Clementina in collaboration with the brothers Giovanni and Cherubino Alberti (1600–02/3).

In 1601 Paul received another major commission, to paint a series of large canvases featuring properties of the Mattei family.

This was a clear sign of the high esteem in which he was held by his fellow artists in Rome as he was the first foreigner to hold this position.

[5] He had many students including his son Cyriacus Bril, Luigi Carboni, Balthasar Lauwers, Willem van Nieulandt II, Pieter Spierinckx, Agostino Tassi and Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom.

These early landscapes are in the Flemish tradition inaugurated by Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel the Elder and further developed by his own brother.

Works from this early period were characterised by a picturesque arrangement of landscape elements and violent contrasts between light and dark.

Bril contrasted steep cliffs with chasms or dark, twisting trees growing from hills next to flat, sunlit pastures.

Paul Bril thus forms one of the links between the panoramic views of Joachim Patinir and the ideal landscape evolved by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.

These small-scale paintings depicted subjects that he and his brother had rendered before on a large scale, such as tempestuous seascapes, hermits in the wilderness, travelling pilgrims, peasants among ancient ruins, hunters and fishermen.

According to a dealer's letter of 1617, Rottenhammer painted the figures in Venice and then sent the plates to Rome for Bril to complete the landscape.