Mountain Landscape

No such mountain exists. Joos de Momper worked in flat, low-lying Antwerp in the early 1600s, and he built his towering peaks entirely in the imagination, a Flemish speciality of fantastic Alpine views made for collectors who would never cross the Alps themselves. He pushes the eye back through browns and ochres in the front to a cold hazy blue in the deep distance, using colour alone to open up miles of air. Tiny travellers thread a pass far below the crags. This large canvas later hung among the roughly 1,400 paintings gathered by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, whose collection became a foundation of the imperial gallery in Vienna.