Grande paesaggio montano

Joos de Momper made his name painting mountains. Van Dyck's book of engraved portraits captioned him simply the painter of mountains, and this wide Alpine view is among his finest. He worked in Antwerp in the early 1600s, when Flemish buyers loved a landscape they could travel with the eye: a high vantage, jagged cliffs falling away on either side, a winding path with tiny horsemen and walkers pausing in the shade of a rock. Almost none of it was seen from life. These are invented mountains, assembled in the studio from memory and convention, the far peaks fading into pale blue to suggest enormous depth. The travellers strung along the road are placed there to measure how far the land runs back.