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Momper is rightly regarded as the most important Flemish landscape painter between Pieter Brueghel and Rubens. Brueghel's influence is clearly evident in this winter landscape, and it is quite probable that his son Jan also painted a number of the figures in this picture.
Momper's personal achievement lies in his rendering of landscape as a picturesque subject matter in its own right. What we see here is no longer a great universal landscape full of symbolically charged allusions, but a scene whose aesthetic appeal is valued for its own sake. Momper's painting is divided into various planes by a kind of backdrop, against which silhouettes are highlighted by a pale light or dark, thundery clouds. People are making their way along tortuous paths on terrain that seems to be hazardous.
Rain-laden stormclouds, sunshine and snow set the atmosphere of the painting. In this respect, Momper has taken an important step towards emancipating the landscape painting as an autonomous genre in which the landscape is not merely a setting for some event, but is treated as a subject matter in its own right.
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