Joos de Momper and Jan Brueghel the Younger, Antwerp 1601 - 1687 Antwerp 1564 - 1635

With Martin Hofer, New York (as by Jan Brueghel the Elder);
Acquired from the above by the late owner in January 1923, together with a Kermesse attributed to David Vinckboons for $4,200;
Thence by descent.

As early as 1604 Karel van Mander, writing in his Schilderboek praised Joos de Momper for "painting landscapes excellently with a clever technique". This painting, which is apparently completely unrecorded and in a remarkable state of preservation, affords an outstanding example of the innovative and distinctive style which made de Momper one of the most important landscape painters of the early seventeenth century. Arguably the most successful and certainly one of the most prolific landscape painters of his generation in Antwerp, de Momper's work is central to the development of landscape painting away from the mannerist traditions of the sixteenth century and towards the greater naturalism of the seventeenth.

Klaus Ertz, who has examined this painting in the original, considers it a work of de Momper's full maturity and has proposed a date of execution around 1620 (certificate dated 22 August 2003). The staffage is the work of Jan Brueghel the Younger. The great similarity in both groupings and execution to the work of his father strongly suggest that these figures were painted while Jan Brueghel the Younger was still active in his father's workshop and before his departure from Antwerp for Rome in May 1622, thus as Ertz suggests, providing a terminus ante quem for the present work. De Momper already enjoyed a close working relationship with the Brueghel workshop: he considered Jan Brueghel the Elder a personal friend and the latter had contributed figures to his landscape paintings for at least a decade (see K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere, Cologne 1979, p. 470, no. 832). De Momper evidently continued this close collaborative relationship with the younger Brueghel, and numerous examples of their joint work are, like the present panel, also dated by Ertz to around 1620 or to the following decade (see K. Ertz, Josse de Momper der Jüngere, Freren 1986, pp. 555, 572-73, cat. nos. 335, 378-380). Although the present painting was most probably intended as a subject in its own right rather than as part of a larger series illustrating the Seasons, it is clearly indebted to de Momper's famous cycles produced around 1610-15, which were among his most important contributions to the development of landscape painting at this date. Many very similar compositional elements in the present work, such as the hunter and horsemen beside a pond on the left and the riders, carriage and château on the right, are all paralleled in the painting depicting Spring from a series of the Four Seasons last recorded in a sale in Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 1 June 1956, lot 130 (panel, 45 by 74.7 cms., reproduced in Ertz, op.cit., p. 618, nos. 559-62, figs. 236-9).