The Outskirts of a walled Town with Figures on a Road in a hilly Landscape

Savery, who worked with Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, travelled through southern Germany and Bohemia. The houses depicted in the present lot are reminiscent of those in his firmly attributed drawings, as well as of those in the oeuvre of Pieter Stevens (circa 1567-after 1624) and Paulus van Vianen (circa 1570-1613), who also worked in Prague at the time. They also recall the prints after the three artists executed by Aegidius Sadeler (1570-1629). In subject and handling this drawing is closely comparable to the black chalk study of travellers in a village in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, inv. no. 2187 (Renaissance et Maniérisme dans les Ecoles du Nord, Paris/Hamburg, 1985-6, exhib. cat., no. 119, illustrated), which Joaneath Spicer (The Drawings of Roelant Savery, Ann Arbor/London, 1979) published as no. C87. Other Savery drawings depicting similar architecture, sometimes of Prague or its surroundings, executed in black chalk or pen and brown ink, partly with coloured wash, are in the National Gallery, Prague; the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin and the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig (J. Spicer and others, Prag um 1600, Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II., exhibition catalogue, Essen/Vienna, 1988, pp. 383-5, nos. 250-4, illustrated). Savery's fascination with wooden constructions, as illustrated in many of his pictures, is reflected in the present lot in the planks attached to the subsidiary building of the house in the lower left (see also K.G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German Drawings of the XVth and XVIth Centuries of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1992, I, p. 317, no. 177, III, plate 269). A comparison with the handling of trees in Savery's pen and ink drawing inscribed and dated 'Roelandt Savery 1605 f. in Praege' in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (K.J. Müllenmeister, Roelant Savery, Freren, 1988, p. 196, no. 24a, illustrated) suggest a dating to that period. The figures in the present lot would seem to have been strengthened and coloured by a later hand.