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Overview
Like many other Dutch artists of his day, Herman van Swanevelt (1602-1655) 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 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.
The story of Adonis is a series of six prints based on the account of the Roman poet Ovid. Te Papa owns a complete set, which like all the other Swanevelts currently in the collection was presented to the Colonial Museum by Bishop Ditlev Monrad in 1869. This, the third scene in the series, has like the others a strong landscape element, depicting a country road through a forest with a large boulder in the left foreground. On the opposite side, Venus stands with the two boys - Cupid identifiable by his bow on the left and Adonis on the right - facing Diana and her companions. The goddess of the chase appears to refuse the choice. Below the image, explanatory verse is provided in French.
Source: 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