Paesaggio roccioso con cascata

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.