Friday, February 9, 2018

MEDITATIONS FOR MIDWINTER: PART 5

Title: Winter Landscape with the Flight into Egypt
Artist: Joos de Momper the Younger
Medium: Oil on panel
Size: 69 x 115 cm
Date: tbd.
Location: Private Collection

Matthew 2:14 “So Joseph got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and escaped to Egypt.”

The present painting, depicting this brief passage from Matthew, belongs to Momper’s most inventive winter landscapes. Here we find the townsfolk seemingly going about their daily business, running errands, playing on the frozen river, with only Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, nondescript in the lower left of the image, moving away from what will become the scene of a massacre. The staffage in this painting is the work of Frans Francken the Younger, Momper's exact contemporary. Francken and Momper collaborated frequently.

Joos de Momper the Younger (1564 - 1635), one of the most important landscape painters of the early 17th century, was the leading member of an Antwerp family of artists and dealers. 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. Only a small number of the 500 paintings attributed to de Momper are signed and just one is dated. The large output points to substantial workshop participation. Attribution is further complicated because of the other members of the family who worked in a similar style.

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