Mountainous Landscape with Figures and a Donkey

Joos de Momper made a career out of mountains at a time when most of his Antwerp neighbours had never seen one. He crossed the Alps on a trip to Italy as a young man, and the cliffs and gorges stayed with him for the rest of his life; he turned out hundreds of these craggy views. He usually painted only the landscape and left the small figures to a specialist collaborator. Here the rocks, the falling valley and the hazy blue distance are the real subject, while a few travellers and their donkey pick their way along the path below. The people are there mostly to give you scale, to show how the mountains dwarf anyone crossing them.