Jesus healing the blind c.1600-20

In this painting, Jesus is seen healing a blind beggar; he and his followers are framed by trees and rocky mountainous terrain. Joos de Momper was a leading landscape painter of his time, active during a period in which Flemish painting shifted focus from an idealist perspective to a realistic rendering. While a dramatic setting like this was often interpreted as expressing the power and wonder of God’s creation, it also hints to a genre of pure landscape painting that emerged in the Western tradition in the sixteenth century.

In the early seventeenth century, Antwerp was a major European centre for art production and was organised around the guild workshop system. The division of labour among artisans and specialists was characteristic of this system: artists would specialise in figure painting (also known as ‘staffage’), background landscape painting or the construction of wood panels and supports. In this work, it has been proposed that the landscape was painted by de Momper or an artist from his circle, while the figures were executed by another artisan, currently identified only by his monogram: ‘IC’.