Landscape with Crab Fishermen, ca. 1608

Savery was a court painter to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague between approximately 1603 and 1616. It was here that he processed the impressions that he gathered during his visits to the Tyrol and Bohemia. A forested landscape with rocks unfolds beneath a bright blue sky. At the base of the work, the bright red outer garments of the two fishermen immediately catch the eye. One holds a crayfish in his right hand. The human figures are but a tiny detail in the overwhelming, but fictitious, landscape. Savery gives free-reign to his imagination in the rocks on the right hand side, which coalesce into the profile of a man’s face: the deciduous trees form a lush head of hair; a variation in the colour of the rock suggests an eye; a bulge equates to a nose and a fissure to a mouth, while trees give the impression of a goatee beard.