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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 fourth scene in the series, shows Venus has introduced Adonis - now a fully grown, svelte young man, to the joys of the hunt - hare are the quarry, humans and hounds are very near and death will be imminent. This curator wishes he could have reasoned with her: 'It'll be the death of him, Venus, take it from me!' But I would be ignored by both of them. As we know, Adonis takes to hunting like a duck to water. Cupid, eternally youthful, urges them on. The theme provided Swanevelt with the perfect opportunity to exercise his skills in the landscape genre. 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