Paysage fluvial avec chasse au sanglier

Around 1600, in Antwerp, landscape was just breaking free to become a subject in its own right rather than a backdrop for saints or kings, and Joos de Momper the Younger was one of the painters pushing it there. The mountains here never existed. He built the scene like a stage set: brown in the foreground, green behind it, then blue fading to a pale distance, with clumps of trees standing in like theatre wings to draw your eye deep into the valley. Momper painted the land but not the people. The small figures wrestling a wild boar to the ground were added by another specialist, Sebastiaan Vrancx, brought in to do the figures, a routine division of labour in the busy Antwerp workshops of the day.