Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth

This 1617 depiction of the Visitation — Mary visiting her cousin Elizabeth — sets the biblical encounter within Joos de Momper's characteristic mountain landscape. The meeting of the two expectant mothers, one carrying the future John the Baptist and the other carrying Christ, was a subject of profound theological significance, and de Momper's treatment transforms the intimate encounter into an occasion for landscape display. De Momper's prolific output — one of the most productive landscape painters in early seventeenth-century Antwerp — was sustained through a well-organized workshop that collaborated with figure specialists. His oil technique uses a distinctive warm brown underpainting beneath the final glazes, creating the atmospheric depth that gives his landscapes their distinctive quality of light. Held at St. Paul's Church in a continued ecclesiastical context, this painting is one of few de Momper works that remain in an original religious setting, connecting his landscape art to the devotional tradition for which much of his religious subject matter was originally created.

The figures are set against a backdrop of sweeping mountain scenery, with the landscape rendered in de Momper's fluid technique while the figures show the hand of a collaborating specialist.