Alongside his career as a connoisseur and art historian, Dillis drew and painted enthusiastically. Between 1808 and 1814 he was a professor of landscape painting at the Munich Academy. Most of his work consists of freely painted watercolors and oil sketches executed directly from nature. This atmospheric study of the staggeringly high Rauschberg mountain may have been influenced by English watercolors, with which Dillis was familiar.