Landscape with Grotto and a Rider

Momper worked in Antwerp, in a Flanders as flat as a table, yet he spent his career painting mountains. This landscape from about 1616 piles up crags, a dark grotto, and a winding path where a lone rider looks tiny against the rock. None of it is a real place. It is an assembled, imaginary Alpine world of the kind Antwerp collectors wanted, many of them merchants who had crossed the actual Alps on the trade road to Italy and remembered the scale. The small figures were often the work of a second, specialist hand rather than Momper's own. He builds distance the old way, in three bands of colour: warm brown in front, green in the middle, blue-grey peaks fading at the back.