Study of the Side of a Rocky Cliff; Verso: Dam on a Mountain Stream 1600-1605 Paulus Willemsz. van Vianen Netherlandish The artist Paulus van Vianen is best known as a goldsmith, who worked for most of his life at the court of Rudolf II (1552-1612) in Prague. Apart from his designs for metalwork, a considerable part of his drawn oeuvre consists of landscapes and nature studies. Considering the fact that the artist made no paintings or print designs with such imagery, we can assume that Van Vianen made these drawings purely for his own pleasure. His sketches are characterized by a remarkable degree of realism, and in that respect can be considered illustrative of the artistic development at the time: during the last decades of the sixteenth- and early years of the seventeenth century, landscape painting made a leap towards greater realism, away from the more idealized and dramatized scenery. The Netherlandish artists Roelant Savery (1576-1639) and Pieter Stevens (1567-after 1626), also