Landscape of the Ocean and the Sea

Joos de Momper spent his career in Antwerp painting sweeping views from an imagined high vantage, and here he turns from his usual mountains to water. The eye looks down over a wide stretch of coast where sea and open ocean meet, ships and small figures scattered across a great distance. Like most Flemish landscapes of the early 1600s, it was not painted from any real place. It is a composed panorama, built in the studio to give the pleasure of enormous space in a single view. Momper made this around 1623, near the end of a long and busy working life.