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Died on 05 February 1635: Joos
(or Jodocus, Josse, Joost, Joeys) Momper the Younger, Flemish
painter born in 1564.
— Momper was the leading member of an Antwerp family of landscape painters.
He was trained by his father, but he probably went to Italy in the 1580s,
in which case he would have seen the Alps: he lived in Antwerp, but his
works are invariably of great mountains, sometimes influenced by Bruegel,
and they form a transition between Mannerist landscape and the realistic
type developed in the Netherlands in the 17th century, e.g. by van
Goyen. His pictures usually have blue mountains
in the background, with a yellowish-green middle distance and a darker foreground
peopled by small figures, often painted by Momper himself. Attribution is
difficult because of the other members of the family who worked in a similar
style.
— LINKS
— River
Landscape with Boar Hunt (1610) — The
Valley (1605, 65x106cm) — Mountain
Road (1610, 33x42cm)
— Helicon
or Minerva's Visit to the Muses (140x199cm) _ This painting is the result
of a co-operation of three artists, Joos de Momper (landscape), Hendrik
van Balen (figures) and Jan
'Velvet' Brueghel (flowers). It is an attractive work with a harmonious
landscape. The foreground and background merge gradually with one another,
forbidding rocks give way to a grand valley, in which the mythological scene
forms a balanced component. Ovid describes (Met. 5:250-268) how Minerva
visited the Muses on Mt Helicon, their home, to listen to their song and
story and to see the sacred spring, the Hippocrene, which flowed from a
rock after it had been struck by the hoof of the winged horse, Pegasus.
The scene is a wooded mountain-side where the company of Muses are playing
their instruments. Pegasus is seen in the background leaping from a high
rock from which water gushes. The association of Minerva and the Muses was
in line with the tradition that made her patroness of the arts.
— Landscape
(174x256cm) _ Joos de Momper followed in the tradition of panoramic landscape
established by Patenier
and Pieter
Bruegel the Elder. The familiar formula of placing browns in the foreground,
greens in the middle and light blues in the background establishes the sense
of aerial space; also the dark shapes of flying birds against the hazy blues
and whites of the sky compound the effect. In the foreground comes the usual
picturesque group of figures.
— Mountain
Scene with Bridges (1600, 53x72cm) _ These distinctively contoured vistas,
punctuated by tiny figures in the foreground, and terminating in colorful,
increasingly transparent backgrounds, are unmistakably Momper. Distance,
scale and breadth - a sensibility that could be called romantic - are combined
here with the traditions of earlier Flemish landscape art.
— Winter
landscape (1620, 50x83cm) _ Momper is rightly regarded as the most important
Flemish landscape painter between Pieter Brueghel and Rubens.
Brueghel's influence is clearly evident in this winter landscape, and it
is quite probable that his son Jan also painted a number of the figures
in this picture. Momper's personal achievement lies in his rendering of
landscape as a picturesque subject matter in its own right. What we see
here is no longer a great universal landscape full of symbolically charged
allusions, but a scene whose aesthetic appeal is valued for its own sake.
Momper's painting is divided into various planes by a kind of backdrop,
against which silhouettes are highlighted by a pale light or dark, thundery
clouds. People are making their way along tortuous paths on terrain that
seems to be hazardous. Rain-laden stormclouds, sunshine and snow set the
atmosphere of the painting. In this respect, Momper has taken an important
step towards emancipating the landscape painting as an autonomous genre
in which the landscape is not merely a setting for some event, but is treated
as a subject matter in its own right.
— Tobias'
Journey (90x136cm) _ An artist who owed much to Pieter Bruegel the Elder
was Joos de Momper, one of the landscape painters preceding the generation
of Rubens who made a real contribution to the development of that genre.
Although he had also made the usual journey to Italy, it was the example
of Bruegel that he followed in his many rocky landscapes, and his vision
that was reflected in the vast scale of the composition and the interpretation
of perspective in distant views. He usually left the staffage to be painted
in by fellow artists specializing in figure painting, as in his Tobias'
Journey.
— Landscape
with the Temptation of Christ (51x83cm) |
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