Joachim Patenier can be considered as the first of the Flemish landscape artists and one of the most important. In 1515, he became a free master of the Guild of Antwerp, almost the same year as Gerard David. Although it has not been clearly established whether Patenier was his pupil in Bruges before coming to settle in Antwerp, it is however certain that the two masters worked together, especially on the décor for the entry of Archduke Charles into Antwerp.

Francisca Buyst, his first wife, was the daughter of the painter Edouard Buyst. In 1521, he remarried taking Jeanne Nuyst as his wife. Dürer, who arrived in Antwerp in 1520, attended the wedding and struck up a friendship with Patenier, whose work he admired. Quentin Matsys was also one of his friends. Famous during his lifetime, his paintings were sought after by the courts of princes and the recently enriched bourgeois class. While Gerard David had little influence on Patenier, Hieronymus Bosch, on the other hand, was a more determining factor. Patenier borrowed certain iconographic formulas from him (penitent saints in the desert), especially this highly characteristic way of placing the horizon line very high up in a landscape seen from on high, which increases in size. However, what Bosch did "by accident", Patenier did deliberately, and he was the first to make landscape an autonomous genre; while there might be religious scenes in his paintings, they are no more than pretexts. Unaware of Italian influences, he imposed his own processes, pure colours and his new vision. After the 16th century, all the great landscape artists – whether Flemish, Italian or French – such as Poussin and Lorrain, were directly inspired by him.