In his biography of Roelant Savery, Joachim von Sandrart recounts that Emperor Rudolf II commissioned the artist to go to the Tyrol to record its ‘remarkable wonders of nature’. For this large mountain landscape, as in the case of other drawings, Savery relied on sketches that he made while traveling around the Tyrol. His work teems with inhospitable forests, sheer cliffs and thundering waterfalls.