Fir trees on top of a peak illuminated by sun rays

Wolf Huber was born in the Alpine village of Feldkrich in Austria in the 1480s and lived and worked mostly in Bavaria. He produced altarpieces, painted portraits and devotional images, but was mainly prolific as a draftsman. Huber created fantastic views of mountainous landscapes with steep crags and majestic trees. Although he did not produce landscape prints, Huber’s compositions circulated widely through drawn copies (see C. Wood, ‘Landscapes by Wolf Huber and Domenico Campagnola, invented, copied, and replicated’, in D. Bohde and A. Nova, Jenseits des Disegno. Die Entstehung selbständiger Zeichnungen in Deutschland und Italien im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, Petersberg, 2018, pp. 313-331). Several versions of Huber landscape drawings are known, and some of those are dated. While many of the replicas were probably drawn by assistants within Huber’s workshop, some were autograph copies made by Huber himself with the intention to market his inventions.

Another version of the present composition, which has been dated to around 1531, is in the Kiel Kunsthalle (inv. D88; see F. Winzinger, Wolf Huber das Gesamtwerk, Munich, 1979, no. 88, ill.).