Tobias' Journey

In the Antwerp workshops of the early 1600s, a landscape and its figures were often two different men's work. Joos de Momper painted mountains, huge imaginary Alpine passes he half-remembered from a trip to Italy, and left the small human business to a specialist, most often his friend Jan Brueghel the Elder. Here the mountains take almost the whole panel. Down in a corner, easy to miss, walk the travellers who give the picture its name: the young Tobias from the Book of Tobit, his dog, and the archangel Raphael disguised as a hired guide, on their way to collect a family debt. The valley drops away below them and a bridge crosses the river. De Momper made hundreds of these wide views, and in most of them the road matters more than whoever happens to be walking it.