Sandy landscape with travellers and cattle

De Momper's sandy landscapes with travelers and cattle represent his treatment of the Dutch lowland terrain that was his Flemish homeland's most characteristic geography, quite distinct from the alpine fantasies for which he is better known. These flatter compositions, with sandy roads and low-growing vegetation peopled with the ordinary traffic of rural life, reflect the Flemish tradition of peasant landscape rooted in Brueghel and continued by his workshop into the seventeenth century. Cattle as landscape staffage carried economic meaning — Flemish rural prosperity embodied in well-fed livestock moving through an ordered agricultural landscape.

De Momper adjusts his atmospheric recession technique to the flat terrain, using horizontal bands of warm and cool to suggest distance across a terrain without dramatic vertical markers. The sandy ground's pale warmth gives these compositions a different chromatic character from his mountainous subjects, with lighter, more varied tones throughout.