Landscape with a high Rock and a Castle at Left

Augustin Hirschvogel (1503-1553) came from a family of glass painters in Nuremberg. He trained in the family craft, then set up a workshop as a majolica painter in his native city. In the late 1530's we find him in the Balkans working as a cartographer for Emperor Ferdinand I. Having established close connections to the Imperial Court, he finally moved to Vienna, where he lived permanently from 1544. It was probably there that he started decorating arms and armour and began to work in the new technique of etching.
He was one of the first printmakers of the German Renaissance to create landscape prints, views of buildings and scenery, without any religious or allegorical content, and indeed the first to execute them in pure etching. He grasped and took full advantage of the spontaneity of the etched line and his scenes are imbued with an almost naïve immediacy, which was new to the medium. He thus stands at the beginning of a long tradition, lasting well into the 19th century, which considered etching as the natural printmaking method for the depiction of landscapes.
Very few impressions of Augustin Hirschvogel's landscapes appear to have survived and they are great rarities on today's art market. Hollstein records a total of twenty impressions and three counterproofs of this print.