A Village Street in Primolano

Van Vianen was born in the Dutch city of Utrecht but spent almost his entire career away from his home country, working as a goldsmith at the courts of Munich, Salzburg, and Prague. In addition to his highly inventive creations in silver and gold, Van Vianen produced a large number of landscape drawings, studied directly from life. According to the inscription at the upper right corner of the sheet, the itinerant artist observed this picturesque scene at the town of Primolano in the southeastern part of the Alps. Combining delicate pen work with translucent washes in gray and pale blue, Van Vianen rendered this Alpine townscape with an almost unprecedented sense of immediacy and ease. While his interest in topography places Van Vianen at the forefront of the move toward greater naturalism in Dutch art, his painterly and highly atmospheric approach to the subject sets him apart from his Dutch contemporaries.