Joos de Momper the Younger

Joos de Momper spent his life in flat, low-lying Antwerp and painted mountains he had probably never climbed. Rocky peaks, plunging valleys and winding roads seen from high above fill his canvases, worked in the bluish greens and warm browns of the Flemish 'world landscape', the sweeping bird's-eye view of nature invented earlier by painters like Joachim Patinir.

Born into a family of Antwerp painters, he became a master of the city's Guild of Saint Luke as a teenager, in 1581. He was enormously productive, and like most landscape specialists of his day he often left the small figures to another hand, most famously the delicate staffage of Jan Brueghel, called 'Velvet' Brueghel, a friend and frequent collaborator.

His mountains grew looser and more naturalistic over his long career, marking the shift from the fantastical panoramas of the 1500s toward the calmer landscapes of the 17th-century Netherlands. He died in Antwerp in 1635.