Fishermen at the Tiber, near the Soracte

Both employs the fine, incised lines characteristic of Baroque etching to model light and shade across water, foliage, and architecture. The delicate hatching creates a sense of atmospheric depth, while the contrast between the crisp foreground figures and the softer background hills underscores the artist’s skill in rendering spatial recession on a single plate.

Although Jan Both’s career peaked in the first half of the 1600s, this particular etching is dated to around 1700, indicating it may have been produced posthumously from his designs or workshop copies. The print has circulated among European collections of Dutch landscape prints, appearing in several 19th‑century catalogues of Both’s oeuvre.

Both’s work belongs to the Dutch Italianate tradition, wherein Northern artists traveled to Italy and returned with idealized visions of its countryside. By situating a familiar fishing activity on the Tiber, the etching merges Dutch genre concerns with the romantic allure of the Italian landscape, a synthesis typical of the period’s cross‑cultural artistic exchange.