The Hague, Het Landschap door Hollanders gezien, 16e-20e eeuw, 1922.
Het landschaps in de Nederlanden 1550-1630.  Van Pieter Bruegel tot Rubens en Hercules Seghers, Breda, de Beyerd, Cultureel Centrum; Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunst, 1960-61, no. 47.
Modernen van Toen 1570-1630.  Vlaamse schilderkunst en haar invloed, Singer Museum, Laren, 1963, no. 116, (illustrated fig. 43).

A beautiful example of the collaboration so common among Flemish artists of the early seventeenth century, this painting combines the complementary skills of two different artists.  Here, the landscape is by Joos de Momper the Younger, while the staffage is by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Impeccably preserved, the painting has remained in a Dutch private collection since 1938, when it was purchased at the Amsterdam sale of the collection of the dealer, collector and auctioneer Anton W. M. Mensing (1866-1936). 

The scene is set in mid-winter in a Flemish village.  A thick layer of snow covers the ground and clings to roofs of buildings.  Trees reach their leafless branches to the sky.  A windmill rises on a hill on the left, and a watermill appears in the river valley on the right, its wheel stuck fast in the ice.  A well-trodden road cuts a diagonal path from left to right, passing a cluster of houses and a country inn in the middle distance, and a large church beyond before disappearing out of sight.  Despite the bitter cold, many people are out and about: horse-drawn carts and travellers on foot and on horseback move along the road, peasants herd their pigs, and villagers laden with sacks of flour trudge through the snow.  A man gathers wood from a fallen tree. Overhead, a pale overcast sky holds the promise of further snow.  De Momper has captured superbly the picturesque chill of winter in pastel hues of blue, green and grey.

Although snow scenes account for a relatively small portion of de Momper’s large output – some sixty paintings out of a total of more than six hundred – he is credited with making a significant contribution to the development of the winter landscape in the Southern Netherlands.  Long popular in the context of cycles of the months and seasons, the winter landscape was introduced as an independent subject by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) in his Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird-Trap[i] of 1565.  In the closing decades of the sixteenth century, the genre was popularised by such artists as Jacob (c. 1525-1590) and Abel Grimmer (1570-1618/19) and Lucas van Valckenborch (c. 1535-1597).

De Momper hardly ever dated his paintings, and for this reason, it is only possible to plot his stylistic development in rather general terms.  His early works display many of the characteristics of the Flemish sixteenth-century landscape tradition, employing an elevated viewpoint, panoramic bird’s-eye view and strong local colours.  However, as the seventeenth century progressed, he gradually developed a flatter, more naturalistic type of landscape, taken from a lower viewpoint and rendered in a more subtle tonal palette.  With its wide, horizontal format, broad painterly technique and restrained colour scheme, the present painting exemplifies de Momper’s mature abilities and can be dated to around 1615-1620.

De Momper rarely added the staffage in his own landscapes but preferred to collaborate with a figure painter.  In this case, the figures are by Jan Brueghel the Elder, nicknamed “Velvet Brueghel” because of the delicacy of his touch.  Brueghel enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with de Momper to whom he referred in 1622 as “Mio amico Momper”[ii].  They collaborated on more than eighty paintings over a period of almost thirty years and, after the Elder Brueghel’s death in 1625, his son Jan the Younger took on his role in the partnership.  The two artists’ styles complemented one another perfectly, with de Momper’s broadly painted landscapes providing an atmospheric setting for Brueghel’s precisely executed, animated little figures.

Thanks to this painting’s exceptionally fine state of preservation we can today appreciate fully the skilful teamwork of Brueghel and de Momper, and with the benefit of infrared imaging, we are able to examine the process by which they worked collaboratively.  An infrared reflectogram taken in 2024 reveals an extensive and detailed underdrawing[iii].  It seems to indicate that Jan Brueghel took the initiative here, laying in the composition by means of an underdrawing, using a few lines to sketch in the general contours of the landscape over the imprimatura layer.  Then, working in much greater detail, he drew the windmill, the houses on either side of it, and the central cluster of trees and buildings.  With a very fine line, probably graphite, he also delineated the retreating, tree-lined river valley and watermill on the right, and sketched in a faint suggestion of the distant church and houses.  Lastly, he drew the animals and figures.  Once the underdrawing was complete, the panel was most likely transferred to de Momper’s studio, where he added the top layers of paint to the landscape using his characteristically fluent brushwork.  Finally, it would have been returned to Brueghel’s for him to finish the figures and animals using small, delicate brushstrokes, and thus creating a seamless integration of their two hands. 

A study of the infrared reflectogram provides us with a valuable insight into Brueghel and de Momper’s mode of working.  The fact that Brueghel took the lead in defining the composition here is perhaps not surprising when one considers that he was a master draftsman as well as a landscape specialist, but in the final product, it was Brueghel’s well-characterised little figures that brought the landscape alive. This contrasts with the role he played in some of his other collaborative ventures, most notably with Rubens and with Hendrick van Balen (1575-1632), in which he supplied the landscape and still-life elements in the composition while his partners contributed the figures. By all accounts, Brueghel’s artistic partnership with de Momper was well established and successful.  To judge from the sheer number of their collaborative paintings, there must have been a strong demand for their joint works.  Indeed, it is likely that in the eyes of discerning collectors there was a certain cachet attached to such collaborative works, especially if one of them bore the prestigious name of Brueghel. 

A survey of de Momper’s oeuvre reveals that he regularly adapted tried and trusted compositional patterns to create new works.  In the present case, he reused part of the composition in a variant of this subject in the Galleria Nazionale d’Art Antica, in Rome[iv], focusing on a close-up view of the left-hand side of the scene with the windmill and the cluster of the houses in the centre.  It is impossible to say which of these two pictures came first, but the composition here is much more fully developed, and the figures are far more numerous and detailed.

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE PAINTERS

JOOS DE MOMPER the Younger

Praised by Karel van Mander for “painting landscapes excellently with a clever technique”[v], Joos de Momper the Younger was born in Antwerp in 1564, the son of the painter and art dealer Bartholomeus de Momper (1535-after 1589) and grandson of Joos de Momper the Elder (1500-1559). After learning his craft from his father, the younger Joos de Momper became a Master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1581.  Shortly after, he seems to have travelled to Italy where he may have worked in the Treviso studio of Lodewyck Toeput (c. 1550-c. 1605), a Flemish émigré, known as Il Pozzoserrato. He was back in Antwerp by 1590, where he married Elisabeth Gobijn with whom he went on to have ten children.  In 1594, de Momper participated in the execution of the decoration for the triumphal entry of the Governor of the Netherlands, the Archduke Ernest, into Antwerp.  Between 1591 and 1599, he is mentioned in the Antwerp Guild records as having a number of pupils.  He served as Dean of the guild in 1611.  Joos de Momper II died in Antwerp on 5 February 1635 and was buried in the St. Joriskerk. 

JAN BRUEGHEL the Elder

Born in Brussels in 1568, Jan Brueghel the Elder was the second son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1520/25-1569) and Maeycken Coecke van Aelst.  His father died shortly after his birth and he is said to have received his early artistic training from his maternal grandmother Mayken Verhulst (1518-1596/99), a miniaturist and watercolour painter.  According to the biographer and art theorist Karel van Mander, Brueghel was taught to paint in oils by Pieter Goetkindt (d. 1583) in Antwerp.  In 1589, Brueghel left for Italy, stopping first in Cologne before arriving in Naples by 1590.  Between 1592 and 1594, he lived in Rome and enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna.  From 1595, until his return to Antwerp in October 1596, Brueghel was in Milan at the invitation of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the artist’s lifelong friend and patron, with whom he conducted an extensive correspondence.

On his return to Antwerp, Brueghel joined the St. Luke’s Guild.  In 1601, he became a citizen and in 1602 served as Dean of the guild.  In 1599, he married Isabella de Jode, and in 1601, their first son Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678) was born.  In 1603, his wife died suddenly, perhaps at the birth of their daughter Paschasia, who later married the artist Jan van Kessel (1626-1679).  In 1604, Jan Brueghel the Elder travelled to Prague, returning to Antwerp later that year.  The following year he married Catharina van Marienberghe who bore him eight children.  In 1606, he was in Nuremburg and in the same year he was appointed court painter to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella in Brussels, a position he held until his death.  Around 1613, he accompanied Rubens (1577-1640) and Hendrick van Balen (1575-1632) on a diplomatic mission to the Northern Netherlands where they met Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) among other Haarlem artists.  In 1625, Jan Brueghel died from cholera during an epidemic which also claimed the lives of three of his children.