Lot and his daughters fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah

Joos de Momper the Younger (1564-1635) was the leading Flemish landscape painter between Brueghel the Elder and Rubens, specializing in panoramic mountain landscapes that combined the topographical fantasy of his predecessors with a new atmospheric spatial depth. The Lot and daughters narrative — the flight from Sodom before its destruction — required a dramatic landscape setting in which the volcanic catastrophe of divine punishment could be integrated with the figures' desperate movement. De Momper's apocalyptic rocky landscapes were ideally suited to this subject, and he produced several versions that gave the biblical narrative the geological scale it demands.

De Momper's atmospheric distance recession — from warm foreground browns through middle-distance greens to cool blue-grey mountains — creates the spatial grandeur that gives his Lot scene its geological scale. The figures of Lot and his daughters are likely by a hand specialist — common in his workshop — while the landscape is entirely his own.