Mountainous River Landscape with Travelers Approaching a Bridge

A landscape painter and draftsman whose work was collected in his own time, Joos de Momper was the outstanding member of a family of artists. He trained with his father, dean of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke, and traveled to Italy in the 1580s. De Momper's work belongs to the transitional period between late sixteenth-century Mannerism and the beginnings of realism in the early seventeenth century. The first drawing by the artist to enter the collection, it strengthens our holdings of Northern landscape before the age of Rubens, joining works by Paul Bril, Hendrik Goltzius, Jacques de Gheyn, and Jan Bruegel.