The Salzach Valley with a View of the Watzmann Massif in the Background

After having travelled through Italy between 1590 and 1596, the Antwerp born artist Frederik van Valckenborg ventured to Austria, Bavaria and the Danube region. Along the way, Van Valckenborg recorded the imposing landscapes he encountered in several sketchbooks. These panoramic views are often topographically accurate, and their realism forms a distinct break with the fantastical mannerist tradition of the late sixteenth-century. The approach and style of Van Valckeborch's sketchbook drawings was clearly determined by the desire to record visible reality as accurately as possible. They attest to a general, growing interest in nature, due perhaps to artists’s extensive travels and the discovery of new scenery.[1]

Van Valckenborg drew in short, carefully placed pen and gray ink lines, without an underdrawing in black chalk. Curved, parallel hatches were used to indicate the irregular surface of the rocks, and watercolors were added to further accentuate modulations in the landscape, as well as to create a suggestion of aerial perspective.

One can observe the outlines of two half-length human figures at the centre of the lower edge of the sheet. Their akward position, as well as the branches of a tree, peaking out the lower right corner, indicate that the sheet at some point was trimmed down, whereby part of the composition was lost.

In all likelihood, this river landscape derives from one of van Valckenborch’s sketchbooks, which once belonged to Archduke Friedrich von Habsburg-Lothringen but was dispersed in 1928.[2] The site has tentatively been identified as the Salzach Valley, south of Salzburg, with a view of the Watzmann massif in the background.




[1] T. Gerszki, The New Ideal of Beauty in the Age of Pieter Bruegel. Sixteenth-Century Drawings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, pp. 136-37. Other sheets, deriving from the same type of sketchbook are found in various public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (inv. no. K.57.44) and the Collection Frits Lugt, Fondation Custodia, Paris (inv. no. 6747).

[2] Cf. T. Gerszki, ‘Quelques problems que pose l’art du paysage de Frederik van Valckenborch’, Bulletin de Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts, Budapest (1974), no. 42, pp. 66–70.