(Woerden circa 1600–1655 Paris)
A rocky landscape with figures fishing by a stream,
oil on canvas, 79 x 105 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Sotheby‘s, London, 30 October 2008, lot 253;
where bought by the present owner

Literature:
C. Steland, Herman van Swanevelt, Petersberg 2010, G2, 36/N, fig. G 104/N

We are grateful to Anna Charlotte Steland for confirming the attribution. She relates the present composition to a smaller painting published by Luigi Salerno in 1977. She also compares the signed and dated 1643 painting with the present composition (see literature, no. G 1,28.)

Herman van Swanevelt was born in Woerdon and worked in both Paris and Rome. In 1623, when he was in Paris, he produced his first signed and dated works and in 1629 he made the move to Rome. In the Italian city he painted a large number of landscapes, many of which depicted an idyllic landscape often with different sunlight reflecting the times of day. Van Swanevelt appears to be one of the first artists of the time to paint landscapes that did not include biblical or mythological subjects. Van Swanevelt’s alias was “heremiet” because he preferred to work alone, even when he was a member of the Bentvueghels.

Van Swanevelt’s paintings were widely celebrated and he was offered commissions from the Barberini family, Pope Urban VIII and the Vatican. His work in the monastery of Monte Cassino represents one of these commissions, whilst he painted landscapes for Philip IV of Spain’s new Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid in collaboration with Claude Lorrain and others. In 1641 he returned to and settled in Paris where he became a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture ten years later. He only occasionally visited his birthplace of Woerden and instead focused on commissions such as the Hôtel Lambert where he assisted in the decoration and made numerous drawings and etchings. In France, he was supported by Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIV and lived in Rue du Temple when he died.

The genre of the “Italianate landscape” was first conceived and developed from 1600 onwards by the artists Paul Bril and Cornelis van Poelenburch. The genre adopted a more classical character in the 1630s because of the works of Van Swanevelt and his contemporaries such as Pieter van Laer and Claude Lorrain.