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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.
The first scene shows the birth of Adonis from the incestuous union of his mother, Myrrha, and her father, the king of Cyprus. In shame Myrrha entreats the gods to punish her, and they transform her into a myrrh tree, the trunk of which eventually splits open to reveal the child. Raised by nymphs, Adonis grows into the most beautiful boy and attracts the desire of the goddess Venus. She teaches him to hunt but has a premonition of his early death. Her fears are realised when Adonis, out hunting, is killed by a wild boar. In the final scene, the inconsolable Venus grieves for the dead youth, from whose blood anemones have sprouted.
In The death of Adonis, the fifth print in the series, the lifeless body of Adonis, his hunting dogs and the great boar are set in the foreground of a lush, idyllic landscape. The split tree trunk and a broken tree stump are reminders of his birth and symbolise his life cut short. The French verse below laments the impatience and impetuousness of youth. Poor Adonis - and poor Venus, as we shall shortly see.
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