Willows by a Brook

1514

Pen and brown ink

153 × 206 mm

Praun-, Esterházy collection

This drawing depicting bare willow trees on the banks of a stream, together with some further landscape studies, some of which only survive as copies, probably once belonged to a sketchbook in which Wolfgang Huber drew when he was travelling in the Lower Alps in 1514. Huber, the court painter to the archbishop of Passau, was one of the great innovative artists of the “Danube school”. His landscape portraits based on direct observation of nature, together with Altdorfer’s works, mark the beginning of a new era in European landscape art.