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Overview
Roelant Roghman (1627-1692) was born in Amsterdam, the son of the engraver Henrick Lambertsz Roghman and Maria Jacobs Savery. He became a student of his namesake and great-uncle, Roelant Savery. Roghman is said to have only had one eye and he painted in a rough and ready way, perhaps a consequence of his eyesight.
While many 17th-century Dutch artists included castles in their landscapes, Roghman focused on them as independent subjects. When he was twenty years old, he began a series of drawings of manor houses and castles that many scholars today consider his greatest achievement. Some mystery surrounds his other paintings, drawings and etchings. Roghman rarely dated his work, especially paintings, so his stylistic development is difficult to trace. Many of his drawings are characterised by zigzag strokes and markings, while the roughly 35 paintings attributed to him are noted for their lively use of colour.
Between 1645 and 1648, Roghman worked on one of his print series with his elder sister Geertruydt, under the title Plaisante Landschappen (‘pleasant landscapes') or ‘Amusing scenes drawn from life by Roelant Rogman’. Their landscape series of more than 200 prints, showing mostly castles and landed estates in the Dutch provinces of North Holland and Utrecht, were very popular. Like Geertruyd, Roelant never married, and died a resident of the old men's almshouse in Amsterdam.
Te Papa currently has seven etchings by Roelant Roghman in its collection, all but one depicting Tyrolean landscapes - an Alpine region in present-day Italy and Austria. Geertruydt is also represented in the collection, with seven etchings depicting village landscapes around Amsterdam, after Roelant. Athough Roghman's trip to the Tyrol is not documented, the prints speak for themselves, and the likely date is indicated by a drawing of the Alps (1654; Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam).
This print, Plate 8 and the final one in the series, depicts travellers on a mountain road, one walking next to a mule, passing a dead fir tree in the right foreground, and another in the centre with a horse-drawn cart. Unlike the other prints in the series, we know the publisher from the signature at the bottom right: this was Jeremias Wolff (1663-1724), the biggest Augsburg publisher of his day. The print was very likely made not long after Roghman's lifetime.
Sources:
British Museum Collection online, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1623872&part Id=1&searchText=tyrolean+landscapes+plate+8+roghman&page=1
Quentin Buvelot, e-mail to Mark Stocker, 25 April 2019
Wikipedia, ‘Roelant Roghman', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roelant_Roghman
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art April 2019