Landscape with a Road Leading Towards a Settlement on a Hill
Joos de Momper the Younger
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
This landscape by Joos de Momper shows a view of a hill, surrounded by water, with a fortified village on top. A road runs in a zigzag pattern from the lower left of the composition across a simple wooden bridge up and down the slopes of the hill. De Momper was one of the most prolific and successful landscape painters of his time, and his pictures were in high demand, by both Netherlandish and international audiences. The artist typically depicted wide panoramas of wooded and mountainous landscapes, which to a large extent were inspired by the artist’s travels through the Alps and Italy. Although the possibility exists that De Momper based this landscape on observations from real-life, it is more likely that this composition sprung largely from the artist’s imagination. Elements such as the flimsy wooden bridge or the little waterfall in the left background, as well as those meandering roads were romantic pictorial devices which De Momper and his contemporaries frequently included. De Momper drew this landscape in pen and brown ink, and added red, brown and blue washes to better articulate the modulations and structures in the landscape. Towards the distance, his lines become more scanty and less detailed, which suggests depth. The dotted lines used to delineate the background scene are typical of the artist’s draftsmanship.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.