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A Wooded Landscape

Creator

Dutch Artist · 1600–1655

Herman van Swanevelt spent his career outside his native Holland. In Paris he painted his first signed and dated works in 1623. In 1629 he moved to Rome, where he painted many landscapes with biblical and mythological subjects. His usual compositional structure, derived from Cornelis van Poelenburgh's work, proved very popular with the Romans, and the Barberini family and the Vatican offered him c

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Date: about 1629–1643
Medium: Brush and brown ink
Culture: Dutch
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum

This monumental, sun-drenched Italianate landscape was drawn by Herman van Swanevelt while he lived in Rome. Swanevelt contrasted dazzling, luminous washes of shadow on the left with brilliantly illuminated passages on the right created by the paper's whiteness. Similarly, he devised drama by juxtaposing the hard cragginess of the rock formation in the foreground at left with the soft, fluffy trees beyond. Swanevelt's drawing style is based on that of Cornelis van Poelenburgh and Bartholomeus Breenbergh, and sometimes resembles that of Claude Lorrain, all of whom were northern European artists working in Rome. From them, Swanevelt learned to use light to unify a picture and set a mood. In his drawing *The Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome* Poelenburgh created similar contrasts of light and shade using wash and the luminosity of the bare, white paper. Swanevelt's style was, in turn, influential; Nicolaes Berchem, for example, imitated Swanevelt's monumental compositions and treatment of the warm Italian sunlight. Scholars are uncertain whether Swanevelt drew this scene outdoors from nature or in the studio.

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