Mountain Landscape with Travelers

This picture was made for a very large room. The canvas is nearly two metres high and more than two and a half metres wide, the kind of landscape that in the 1620s was painted to fill a wall in a palace, and the Boston museum's own label says as much. Momper was around 60 by then. Ragged cliffs and distant valleys open up across the canvas, and the travellers of the title move through them, small against the rock. The painting's recent history passes through the hands of two economists. It appeared at an anonymous sale at Christie's in London in 1984 and spent some years in a private collection in France. In 1998 the Dutch-born Harvard economist Hendrik Houthakker, who had advised President Nixon, sold it to Horace Wood Brock, an economist and collector of European decorative arts. In 2015 Brock passed it to the Museum of Fine Arts, partly as a gift and partly as a sale.