(Antwerp 1564–1635)
(Antwerp 1573–1647)
An extensive river landscape with elegant figures near a bridge,
oil on panel, on the back the hand mark of the city of Antwerp,
63 x 105.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Flanders, until 2020

We are grateful to Luuk Pijl for endorsing the attribution of the present painting to Joos de Momper and Sebastiaen Vrancx. A copy of a written certificate (October 2020) is available.

Pijl wrote: ‘The work is confidently executed in Josse de Momper’s loose and colorful manner. No Antwerp master is able to render trees, mountains and architecture in a summary style with small agile dabs of paint, not very different from the handling of 19th century French impressionists. Only very few of De Momper’s landscapes are signed by the master and they are very rarely dated. A very large painting on canvas, on loan to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, is signed and dated 1623 (see P. Sutton, The Age of Rubens, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1993/94, no. 80, ill.).

The present work certainly dates from the very same mature period of the master and a date somewhere during the early 1620s is fully feasible for the work […]. The colorfully executed, fashionably attired humans and the animals in the present painting are painted in Sebastiaen Vrancx’s careful manner. Their colourful clothes add a vibrant note to the harmonious hues of the landscape.’