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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. In this, the final print in the series, the distraught Venus gets out of her chariot, her arms raised as she beholds the dead body of Adonis, killed by the boar. From Adonis's blood anemones have sprouted - metamorphosis is a recurrent them in Ovid, who wrote the original story. Adonis's faithful hounds grieve beside him and even the airborne Cupid for once doesn't seem mischievous or amused. To the right of the main composition is a recently hacked tree-stump, symbolising Adonis's life cut cruelly short. 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