River Landscape with Wagons on a Road near a Village

This drawing by Joos de Momper shows a rural scene of a country road nearby a village with horses and carriages setting out. The composition served as design for a print that was part of a series of four landscapes, each symbolizing one of the four seasons. According to the inscription on the print after our design, this image was meant as an allegory of Spring. The print, made by Theodoor Galle (1571–1631), shows that in the final design some noticeable adjustments were made: sumptuous vegetation was inserted in the foreground and a detailed view of a bay with sailing boats has been added in the background. The tree depicted to the left of our drawing, moreover, features much more prominently in the print and the possibility exists that originally, this was the case in our drawing as well. The few branches peeking awkwardly into the picture could be the remnants of a tree that were left when the sheet was trimmed. The sheet does not show traces of transfer. Possibly, a different version of the drawing, which included the compositional adjustments mentioned above, was used as the final print design.

Joos de Momper was one of the most prolific landscape painters of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century. Typically, his pictures show wide panoramas of wooded and mountainous landscapes. This print design, however, more resembles a genre scene, a type of imagery he reserved for his print designs. In all likelihood, De Momper assembled this composition with the help of some stock imagery. The figures, for example, can be seen returning in other examples of his work and that of his collaborator and friend, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625).[1]





[1] Cf. for example Village Scene with a Well, 1625, private collection.