Rock Landscape with a Waterfall

Two hands made this around 1610. Joos de Momper built the landscape, an invented, mountainous world of the kind Flemish painters loved, where the road climbs past a falling cascade and the far peaks turn cold blue and vanish into cloud. Then Jan Brueghel the Elder, one of the finest small-figure painters in Antwerp, added the life, a hunter with his dogs, riders working up the mountain track, herdsmen with cattle resting by the water. Splitting a picture between a landscape specialist and a figure specialist was ordinary practice in Antwerp then. The panel later travelled far. It entered the collection of Catherine the Great, the empress whose picture-buying founded the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, where it still hangs.