The Storm at Sea

Joos de Momper the Younger ran one of the busiest landscape workshops in Antwerp in the early 1600s, turning out mountain views and sea pieces for a wide market. A storm at sea like this one belonged to a popular kind of picture in the Low Countries, where pitching ships and shipwrecks stood for the smallness of people against forces they could not control. He builds the scene in cool greens and greys, the vessels flung about at the mercy of the waves under a broken sky. Momper often left the small figures to other hands, painting the weather and the water himself.