half of the 16th century by Joachim Patinir and had reached its peak with Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The landscapes depict imaginary mountains characterized by rocky peaks seen from a high viewpoint and typically including a religious or mythological scene. These landscapes often include villages and figures dwarfed by their surroundings rendered in meticulous detail. His work closely resembles in style the set of 12 large prints published by Hieronymus Cock after designs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which are referred to by art historians as the Large Landscapes. The earliest works of Verhaecht are clearly conservative in style. 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. In the 1620s and 1630s he painted panoramic landscapes with a high horizon and using the traditional three-color plan. He was thus still working in the fantastic landscape tradition at a time when Jan Brueghel the Elder was painting casual village landscapes, and his former pupil Rubens had realized some beautiful atmospheric landscapes. Verhaecht's landscapes were not entirely oblivious of the work of Josse de Momper and Gillis van Coninxloo who were evolving towards a more close-up and realist approach and he adopted some of the elements of the new approach. He collaborated with other local painters such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Frans Francken the Younger, Sebastian Vrancx and Gillis Coignet who painted the figures in his paintings. Some of Verhaecht's landscapes were made into prints. References External links Artists from Antwerp 1561 births 1631 deaths Flemish Renaissance painters Flemish landscape painters Painters from Antwerp