Tobias Verhaecht

His style was indebted to the mannerist world landscape developed by artists like Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Before 1590 he travelled to Italy and first worked in Florence where Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany was his patron.

Not long after he married Suzanna van Mockenborch, who was the granddaughter of Peter Paul Rubens' stepfather Jan de Landmetere, and a cousin of his mother.

[3] Verhaecht was a member of the Violieren, a local Chamber of rhetoric connected to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke for which he wrote a comedy in 1620.

The landscapes depict imaginary mountains characterized by rocky peaks seen from a high viewpoint and typically including a religious or mythological scene.

The steep and bizarre rock formations and the strange atmosphere are indebted to Joachim Patinir, who was already dead for three-quarters of a century when Verhaecht started to create these works.

Verhaecht shows in these works that the evolution of landscape painting during the second half of the sixteenth century had largely passed him by.