Joos de Momper

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 16 January 1925, lot 132 (as Joos de Momper), for £75–12s. to Baylis;

With St. James’s Gallery, London, 1959 (according to a mount at the Witt Library);

Vere Harmsworth, 3rd Viscount Rothermere (1925–98), London;

Thence by inheritance until anonymously sold (‘The Property of a Lady’), London, Christie’s, 2 July 1976, lot 77 (as Joos de Momper the Younger, the staffage probably the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder);

Where acquired by the father of the previous owner;

By whom anonymously sold (‘Property from an Important Private Collection’), London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 2013, lot 9 (as Joos de Momper);

With Johnny van Haeften, London;

From whom acquired.

K. Ertz, Josse de Momper der Jüngere, Freren 1986, pp. 247, 579–80, no. 413, reproduced p. 246, fig. 276 (the staffage either by Jan Brueghel the Elder or the Younger);

K. Ertz, Jan Brueghel der Ältere (1568–1625). Kritischer Katalog der Gemälde. Jan Brueghel d. Ä. als Mitarbeiter, Lingen 2008–10, vol. 4, p. 1591, no. 779, reproduced (the staffage possibly by Jan Brueghel the Younger).

This panel dates to Joos de Momper’s maturity, circa 1620. De Momper was a highly prolific landscapist—in his 1986 catalogue, Klaus Ertz lists nearly six hundred works by the artist—but winter landscapes make up only around a tenth of his vast œuvre. Paintings like the present example, however, which is on a not inconsiderable scale, clearly demonstrate De Momper’s facility for the subject and his skill in capturing the at once magical and bleak weather conditions of a cold, snowy day, the sun barely filtering through the cloud-covered sky. With a limited palette of whites, greys and browns, De Momper conveys the feeling of temperature and atmosphere in the icy townscape, figures huddled against the elements, their tracks visible in the snow. The focus of the composition is the distinctive double avenue of bare trees, the form of which aids a deep sense of recession from fore- to background; such a singular feature would seem to foreshadow the unusual and powerful Avenue at Middelharnis by Meindert Hobbema, executed over sixty years later,¹ which in turn inspired Impressionist and Contemporary paintings based on the same compositional device.

De Momper’s paintings originate in the earlier Flemish tradition of panoramic ‘world landscapes’, pioneered by artists such as Joachim Patinir and Herri Met de Bles. Pictured from a high viewpoint and defined by receding tonal planes, such paintings contain vast vistas, often full of anecdotal detail. De Momper was famed for his mountain views, which draw directly from such precedents; indeed, on Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of the artist for his Iconographia, 1630–1640, De Momper is given the moniker, ‘Pictor montium’ (‘Painter of mountains’).² By the time De Momper executed a work like this, however, in around the third decade of the 17^th century, his horizon lines tended to be rather lower, and many of the views—though still imaginary—of a more familiar and realistic nature.

Winter landscapes were erstwhile components of pictorial cycles of the months and seasons in the sixteenth-century, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder is credited with the first treatments of the genre as an independent subject in the 1560s.³ By the 1620s, though, following the examples of artists from the turn of the century, such as Jacob and Abel Grimmer, other painters came to specialise in such scenes, and the genre would enjoy long-lasting popularity as the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Holland persisted throughout the seventeenth century (and beyond).

Thick strokes of white paint, swiftly applied, may be found in the foreground here, almost creating a three-dimensional impression of snowdrifts. In other areas of the painting rapid underdrawing in black chalk has become more apparent. The work therefore serves as an instructive demonstration of De Momper’s working method, which at its best is defined by a freedom of execution both in the underdrawing and the painted surface, as here, lending the landscape an animated character that is enhanced by the staffage. Indeed, the figures and animals likely painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder enliven the scene, perhaps precisely because their painstaking detail is somewhat in contrast, and consequently complementary, to their freely-painted surroundings. De Momper rarely painted the staffage in his own landscapes, and he and Brueghel the Elder collaborated on more than eighty paintings over a period of almost thirty years. In a letter to Ercole Bianchi in 1622, written on Brueghel’ s behalf by Rubens, Brueghel specifically referred to de Momper as ‘Mio amico Momper’. When Jan Breughel the Younger took over his father’s studio when the latter departed for Italy (in that same year), he went on to work with De Momper as well.

De Momper often painted variants of his own compositions, with minor changes to details such as buildings or vegetation. A related, signed painting in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, repeats many of the motifs in the present work—including the striking double avenue of trees—and is of a similar compositional structure (fig. 1).⁴ The figures in that work however, possibly by David Teniers the Elder, have been modified to represent the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt, the village has been enlarged, and a humpback bridge appears in the foreground. A preparatory drawing for the Ashmolean painting was sold in Leipzig, 8 November 1926, lot 111, from the Max Perl collection.

¹ National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG830; oil on canvas, 103.5 x 141 cm.

² See Anthony van Dyck, Judocus de Momper, Iconographia, 1630–1640, published by Gillis Hendricx. Etching, 242 x 157 mm., British Museum, London, inv. no. 1866,1013.1005.

³ Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Winter landscape with skaters and a bird trap, 1565, oil on panel, 37 x 55.5 cm., Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, inv. no. 8724; and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the snow, 1565, oil on panel, 116.5 x 162 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. no. 1838.

⁴ Inv. no. WA1931.16; oil on canvas, 114 x 164 cm.