Herman van Swanevelt (Woerden c. 1603 - Paris 1655)

Van Swanevelt’s year of birth can be placed around 1603 on the evidence of a marriage certificate of 5 January 1650 in which he stated that he was 46 at the time. He was a great-grandson of Lucas van Leyden and was born in Woerden, a small town to the west of Utrecht. It is not known with whom he trained but proposed teachers are his uncle Steven Huigensz, Abraham Bloemaert and Willem Buytewech. Van Swanevelt spent most of his life abroad. A drawing annotated ‘HVS a paris: 1623 / 24 oktober’ shows that in 1623 he was in Paris, where his mother’s family lived. He may have set out for Italy from there. The earliest document placing him in Rome is from 1629, and it was there that he made his first dated painting, a landscape with an Old Testament scene of 1630.¹¹The Hague, Museum Bredius; illustrated in A.C. Steland, Herman van Swanevelt (um 1603-1655): Gemälde und Zeichnungen, II, Petersburg 2010, p. 390. He is mentioned in numerous archival papers in Rome in the 1630s. He joined the local Bentvueghel society of Dutch artists and was nicknamed ‘the Hermit’. According to Joachim von Sandrart, who met him in Rome, this was because he often went out to sketch in deserted places outside the city. In 1634 he spent some time in prison because, as a Protestant, he had not observed a day of fasting. Two years later he accused his pupil Francesco Catalano of stealing two paintings by Pieter van Laer. He received several prestigious commissions while in Italy, including frescoes for Santa Maria sopra Minerva, decorations for the house of Cardinal Antonio Barberini and murals for Buen Retiro Palace for King Philip IV of Spain.

In 1641 he returned to the north by way of Florence and Venice. According to an inscription on one of his landscapes, by 1642 he was back in Woerden but he did not settle there. He lived in Paris from 1642 or 1643, and in 1644 was naturalized and appointed painter-in-ordinary to the king. Seven years later he was elected a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Around the mid-1640s he and several other artists, Jan Asselijn among them, were involved in the decoration of the Cabinet de l’amour in the Hôtel Lambert, for which he executed two landscapes. Van Swanevelt continued to travel extensively. He was in Woerden several times in the late 1640s and 1650s, and in 1654 he may have been in Utrecht, for in that year Baron Willem Vincent van Wyttenhorst bought a landscape with Diana, Venus and Adonis from him. Inscriptions on other works suggest that he was in Calais in 1646 and in Rome in 1649. He took Suzanne Rousseau, a Protestant, as his wife in 1650 after a planned marriage to another woman fell through in 1644. His last dated painting, River Landscape with Figures on a Riverbank, is from 1655, the year of his death.²²Present whereabouts unknown; illustrated in A.C. Steland, Herman van Swanevelt (um 1603-1655): Gemälde und Zeichnungen, II, Petersburg 2010, p. 489.

Van Swanevelt produced Italianate landscapes that are the backdrop for biblical or mythological scenes. In addition to paintings and frescoes he left a large number of drawings. His brother-in-law Jacques Rousseau (1630-1693) was a pupil.

Gerdien Wuestman [publication date 2026]

References
C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vrij schilder const, inhoudende den lof vande vermarste schilders, architecte, beldthowers ende plaetsnijders van deze eeuw, Antwerp 1662, p. 259; J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. A.R. Peltzer, Munich 1925 (ed. princ. Nuremberg 1675), p. 190; G.B. Passeri, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti, Rome 1679 – transcr. and annot. J. Hess, Die Künstlerbiographien von Giovanni Battista Passeri, Leipzig/Vienna 1934, pp. 174-76; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, II, Amsterdam 1719, p. 352; R. van Eynden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, sedert de helft der XVIII eeuw, I, Haarlem 1816, pp. 138-40; A. Bertolotti, Artisti belgi ed olandesi a Roma nei secoli XVI e XVII: Notizie e documenti raccolti negli archivi romani, Florence 1880, pp. 127-38; G.J. Hoogewerff, Bescheiden in Italië omtrent Nederlandsche kunstenaars en geleerden, II, The Hague 1913, pp. 49, 50, 53, 97, 114, 127; Vollmer in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXII, Leipzig 1938, pp. 339-80; E. Brunetti, ‘Some Unpublished Works by Codazzi, Salucci Lemaire and Patel’, The Burlington Magazine 100 (1958), pp. 311-17, esp. p. 316, note 30; Blankert in A. Blankert, H.J. de Smedt and M.E. Houtzager, Nederlandse 17e eeuwse Italianiserende landschapschilders, exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum) 1965, pp. 98-99; D. Bodart, ‘La biografia di Herman van Swanevelt scritta da Giovanni Battista Passeri’, Storia dell’Arte, no. 12 (1971), pp. 327-30; Chong in P.C. Sutton et al., Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 1987-88, p. 489; M. Szanto, ‘The Fortunes of a Northern Artist in Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Forgotten Years of Herman van Swanevelt’, The Burlington Magazine 145 (2003), pp. 199-205; M. Boers, ‘De schilderijenverzameling van baron Willem Vincent van Wyttenhorst’, Oud Holland 117 (2004), pp. 181-243, esp. pp. 221, 223; N. Plomp, ‘Het leven van Herman van Swanevelt’, in A. Blankert et al., Het zuiden tegemoet: De landschappen van Herman van Swanevelt 1603-1655, exh. cat. Woerden (Stadsmuseum) 2007, pp. 20-31; M. Szanto, ‘“Monsieur Armand” en de wereld van de Parijse kunstliefhebbers – de kring van Passart’, in ibid., pp. 72-75; A.C. Steland, Herman van Swanevelt (um 1603-1655): Gemälde und Zeichnungen, I, Petersburg 2010, pp. 11-19, 109-11 (documents)