Alpine Landscape

Alpine Landscape by Joos de Momper the Younger from around 1600 exemplifies the imaginary mountain scenes that were his specialty. De Momper, working in Antwerp, created convincing alpine scenery from artistic tradition rather than direct observation, synthesizing the mountain vocabulary established by Pieter Bruegel the Elder into his own personal idiom of craggy peaks, winding paths, and atmospheric distance. De Momper's alpine landscapes were constructed from imagination and artistic convention, elaborating Bruegel's compositional formulas into an extensive series of mountain views that satisfied the Antwerp market's taste for dramatic landscape subjects. Working in Antwerp, he was one of the most productive landscape painters in early seventeenth-century Flanders, his workshop producing a large body of imaginary mountain views that documented a terrain most of his patrons had never seen. The three-zone color system he employed — warm foreground browns graduating to green middle distances and cool blue mountains beyond — became standard practice for the Flemish landscape tradition and influenced the development of European landscape painting well into the seventeenth century.

The dramatic mountain terrain is rendered with the traditional Flemish three-zone color system, warm foreground browns graduating through greens to cool blue distance.