item details
Overview
Herman van Swanevelt (1603-1655) was a Dutch painter and etcher from the Baroque era. He was born to a family of thriving artisans in Woerden, which was even in those days in easy reach of the Netherlands' four leading cities.
Like many of the Dutch artists of his day, Swanevelt spent many years in Rome, where there was a community of artists from Holland, Flanders, France and Germany. There he specialised in highly composed Italianate landscape paintings for a royal and aristocratic clientele. Landscape painting came into vogue as an independent genre in Italy in the early 17th century, and its greatest practitioners tended to be northern European trained or influenced. Paul Bril, like Swanevelt, was Dutch; Nicolas Poussin was French; and perhaps the most famous of them all, Claude Lorraine, was from Lorrain/Lorraine in eastern France but then part of the Holy Roman Empire.
After more than a decade in Rome, Swanevelt moved to Paris, which was starting to rival Rome as a cultural centre, and in 1651, not long before his death, he became a member of the newly established Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture). It was in Paris that Swanevelt produced the majority of his one hundred or so landscape etchings. Many of them are based on religious or mythological subjects, but here landscape is ascendant. The inscription stating that the print was made 'cum privilegio Regis' indicates that it dates from this period. It comes from the series known as Twelve landscapes and is the only one currently in the collection that represents it. The scene depicting the procession towards the entrance of a hospital, with figures holding a barely discernible patient on a stretcher, has a real gravitas, making it relate to the later landscapes of Poussin. The landscape itself definitely has an Italianate grandeur, nothing like what we would see in Swanevelt's Netherlands. However, the foreground seated couple and three men standing on a mound - two of whom are conversing - lend the scene a lighter-hearted, everyday genre edge.
Te Papa currently has 34 Swanevelt etchings in its collection. All of them were presented to the Colonial Museum by Bishop Ditlev Monrad in 1869.
Sources:
British Museum Collection online, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1629952&partId=1&searchTe xt=swanevelt+hospital&page=1
David Maskill, 'Herman van Swanevelt...', in William McAloon (ed.), Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2009), p. 35.
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2019