Herman van Swanevelt

Herman van Swanevelt (1604, Woerden – 1655, Paris) was a Dutch painter from the Baroque era.

Life

He painted his first signed and dated works in 1623 in Paris. In 1629 he moved to Rome, where he painted many landscapes with biblical and mythological subjects. There is no evidence to support the tradition that he lived in the same house as Claude Lorrain in about 1627/28 , but it is certain that he had contact with other French artists as well as Dutch ones in the city.

He proved very popular and the Barberini family and the Vatican offered him commissions. Along with Lorrain and others, he also painted landscapes for Philip IV of Spain's new Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid.

In 1641 he returned to Paris, where he remained except for occasional visits to his birthplace. He became a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1651. He assisted in the decoration of the Hôtel Lambert and made numerous drawings and etchings. His patrons in France were Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV.

Art

During the beginning of the 1630s his development runs parallel to Claude's, and in some ways even anticipates it. During the thirties Swanevelt refined his idyllic landscape style. Swanevelt was an important link between the first generation of Dutch italianate painters, such as Cornelis van Poelenburch and Bartholomeus Breenbergh, and those of the second generation who imitated his monumental compositions and his treatment of southern sunlight. In the last decade of his life Swanevelt made a few trips to Woerden, when he also painted typical Dutch scenery.

Works

For a long time the only murals attributed to Swanevelt were the two lunettes in the sacristy of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, of which only one survived. Art historian Susan Russell proposed that a frieze with seven scenes from the life of Saint Joseph in the east wing of Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona was also painted by him. [Susan Russell: Burlington Magazine, Vol. 139, No. 1128 (Mar., 1997), pp. 171-177]

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