Study of the Side of a Rocky Cliff; Verso: Dam on a Mountain Stream

The artist Paulus van Vianen is best known as a goldsmith, who worked for most of his life at the court of Rudolf II (1552–1612) in Prague. Apart from his designs for metalwork, a considerable part of his drawn oeuvre consists of landscapes and nature studies. Considering the fact that the artist made no paintings or print designs with such imagery, we can assume that Van Vianen made these drawings purely for his own pleasure. His sketches are characterized by a remarkable degree of realism, and in that respect can be considered illustrative of the artistic development at the time: during the last decades of the sixteenth- and early years of the seventeenth century, landscape painting made a leap towards greater realism, away from the more idealized and dramatized scenery. The Netherlandish artists Roelant Savery (1576–1639) and Pieter Stevens (1567–after 1626), also active at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, were among the most influential figures in this development.

It is known that Van Vianen went out into nature together with his fellow countrymen to study the local scenery: several sketches by both Van Vianen and Stevens record other artists sitting amid the trees with sketchbooks on their lap. Since our drawing has the size of a small pocketbook, and is worked on both recto and verso are worked, it is likely that the sheet derived from one of the artist’s sketchbooks.

The drawing on the recto shows a study of a rock formation cautiously executed in delicate pen lines and blue and brown washes. Van Vianen minutely captured all the facets of the rock’s unruly surface. In the second picture plane, in contrast, he chose a freer handling, mostly using brush and blue wash. The verso contains a sketch of a small waterfall in a mountain stream. Here, the artist obtained a powerful suggestion of the moving water and its shimmers, by using subtle gray washes over scanty pen lines.