The Toledo Museum of Art introduced its latest acquisition, a recently discovered painting by the Flemish artist Joos de Momper the Younger, to the public yesterday, but astute museum visitors may have seen it earlier this year.

A Summer Landscape with Harvesters, considered a major work by the landscape painter, is in the museum s Great Gallery and is the first new painting to be purchased for the space in more than a decade.

Staff members, docents, and visitors coming out of the Van Gogh: Fields exhibition may have noticed the painting when it was hung briefly as an “anonymous loan” while under consideration for purchase, said Lawrence Nichols, curator of European painting and sculpture before 1900. “In fact, we were somewhat influenced by the public s response to this new picture on the wall. We certainly anticipated they would be intrigued.”

Roger Berkowitz, museum director, said he fully expects the painting to become a favorite among visitors. “It is a spectacular, dramatic scene with over 70 figures engaged in a variety of intriguing activities of work and rest.”

The painting, the first work by De Momper and the first Flemish landscape of this scale to become part of the museum s collection, depicts a hilly pastoral landscape peppered with minute detail and multiple scenes of activity. Laborers are cutting, bundling, and hauling grain; and people are eating, drinking, and engaged in conversation. Ships drift in a bay, a dog runs to meet its master, and a man hauls water to workers in the field.

Mr. Nichols said the human figures, birds, and animals would have been added to De Momper s landscape by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625.) He explained that it was common for De Momper to collaborate with other artists in this fashion.

A Summer Landscape with Harvesters is the largest and most spectacular of De Momper s harvest scenes and was likely part of a series.

Mr. Nichols found the five-by-eight-foot painting in March at the leading old master art fair he attends yearly in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

“Some years you just look and learn and drool, and other years you look and learn and see something that you re just so passionate about you come back with raves to your director and pursue it. In this case, it was the latter.”

After the painting was brought to Toledo, it underwent a period of evaluation to determine whether it was a suitable purchase for the museum s collection.

It was acquired with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey bequest in memory of her father, Maurice A. Scott. The museum declined to divulge the purchase price.

Mr. Nichols said the painting previously had been in private collections in Spain since the early 17th century. Scholars believe De Momper, who lived from 1564 to 1635, painted the scene around 1610 when Flanders was a province of Spain and trade was extensive between the two.

The painting is a recent discovery for the art profession, and is not included in a 1986 book cataloging several hundred of the artist s paintings, Mr. Nichols added. “I didn t know about it till I walked in that art fair and was bowled over by it.”

A Summer Landscape with Harvesters is on its own wall in the Great Gallery, near the Crowning of Saint Catherine by Peter Paul Rubens.

First Published November 15, 2003, 11:36 a.m.