Swanevelt, Both, and Berchem

Herman van Swanevelt (1603-1655) was born to a family of Dutch artisans in central Netherlands. At the age of twenty he was already living and painting in Paris, and by 1829 he had moved on to Rome. There this young Dutch artist collaborated closely with Claude Lorrain in developing the classical Italianate style in landscape painting, receiving major commissions from private, clerical, and royal patrons. Swanevelt returned to Paris in 1641, where he became a member of the Académie Royale and received royal commissions until his death in 1665.

In subject and style, Herman van Swanevelt’s idealized Dutch Italianate landscapes differ sharply from Jan Steen’s realistic Dutch figure paintings. Yet these two Dutch painters play a similar role in Melville's “At the Hostelry,” the colloquy among Old Master painters he was still revising at the time of his death in 1891.

Steen in section 6 harmonized a spirited debate among Dou, Veronese, Watteau, and Spagnoletto by declaring that “All’s picturesque beneath the sun.” Swanevelt in section 4 had already attempted to resolve a dispute among Steen, Frater Lippi, and Spagnoletto by declaring, “Vain here to divide— / The Picturesque has many a side” (NN BBO 161-63, 154).

Melville’s Swanevelt then immediately added his own personal definition of the picturesque:

For me, I take to Nature’s scene

Some scene select, set off serene

With any tranquil thing you please—

A crumbling tower, a shepherd piping,

My master sure with this agrees.

Swanevelt’s appeal in the last line of this passage is to his master Claude Lorrain, who, however, chooses not to say “whate’er he felt / Yet friendly nodded to Swanevelt” (NN BBO 154).

Melville’s first exposure to actual paintings by Swanevelt came during his visit to London in 1849, when he was thirty years old. At Hampton Court on November 11 he could have seen at least three Italianate landscapes by Swanevelt. Three more Swanevelts were among the “gallery full of gems” he visited at Dulwich Picture Gallery six days later (NN J 16, 20). Each in a different way demonstrates this painter’s ability to create “serene scenes . . . set off . . . with any tranquil thing you please.”

Swanevelt’s An Italian Landscape (fig. 1) exemplifies his ability to situate four generic travelers in a composite landscape whose foreground figures guide the viewer’s eye in toward the solitary figure standing on the edge of a stream before a distant distance mountain while also veering past the lone tree on the left and back cross the foreground to the cluster of trees and steep rockface beneath the sunstruck ecclesiastical or palatial structure up to the right.

CAT 214 before (fig 1) Swanevelt An Italian Landscape Dulwich Gallery.jpg

Figure 1. Herman van Swanevelt. An Italian Landscape, oil on canvas, c. 1645. Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Swanevelt’s Italian Landscape with Bridge (fig. 2) gives us a brighter, broader, more expansive view of passing through a particular landscape at a particular time of day, the lovely arch of the bridge enriched by the sun and shadow laving its sunstruck inner arch, its descending curve perfectly reflected in the serene stream as the figures to the right of the bridge appear to pause.

CAT 214 before (fig 2) Swanevelt Italian landscape with bridge.jpg

Figure 2. Herman van Swanevelt. Italian Landscape with Bridge, oil on canvas, 1645-48. Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Swanevelt’s Arch of Constantine (fig. 3) shows his ability to confer a similar sense of serene grandeur by bathing an imperial building with light so bright above the scattered figures on the shadowed ground that one half expects the horses carved in low relief high above to to set their stone tableau in motion.

CAT 214 before (fig 3) swanevelt Arch of Constantine Rome dulwich.jpg

Figure 3. Herman van Swanevelt. Arch of Constantine, oil on canvas, 1645. Dulwich Picture Gallery.

No wonder young Melville, after being introduced to Italianate landscapes in paintings such as these, had hoped to extend his travel to Rome and its environs after visiting the galleries of London, Paris, and Cologne in November and December 1849.

Melville did visit Rome, its environs, and its galleries during a six-week stay in February and March 1857, so his depiction of Swanevelt in the unpublished manuscript of “At the Hostelry” was enriched not only by the paintings his had seen in art galleries, the prints he had collected in his own home, and the books he had collected in his own library, but also by his memory of the face of nature in Italianate landscapes he had seen with his own eyes.

Swanevelt’s residence in Rome from 1629 to 1641, and his collaboration with Claude Lorrain during much of that time, made him a major inspiration for two subsequent Dutch Italianate artists in Melville’s collection: Jan Both and Nicolas Berchem. Swanevelt did return periodically to his hometown of Woerden (near Utrecht) after residing in Rome, but he made his home in Paris until his death in 1655. There he became a member of the Royal Academy, was patronized by Louis XIV, and collaborated with Pierre Patel, a practitioner of his on Italianate landscape style, in the decoration of Hôtel Lambert (see our CAT 145).

Much like Rubens, though not in such a flamboyant way, Swanevelt had a strikingly transnational career. In addition to his extended residence and influence in Italy, France, and Holland, he received a major commission from King Philip IV of Spain for the Buon Retiro in Madrid, where he collaborated with Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Gaspar Dughet, and Jan Both. Swanevelt’s work remained highly respected in Europe until near the end of the nineteenth-century. Since then, he has been remembered less for his own paintings than as “an important link between the Dutch Italianates of the first generation . . . and those of the second generation, such as Jan Both, Jan Baptist Weenix, and Nicolaes Berchem, who imitated his monumental compositions and his treatment of southern sunlight” (Bos 61).

Works cited in Swanevelt, Both, and Berghem:
“Allegory of America, Nicolaes Berchem.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/335063.

Baetjer, Katherine. “Buying Pictures for New York: The Founding Purchase of 1871.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004) 161-235.
Bos, Luuk. “Swanevelt, Herman van.” Grove 30: 60-61.

Fagan, Louis. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Engraved Works of William Wollett. London: Fine Arts Society, 1885.

Greg, T. Tylston. “The Line Engravings of William Woollett.” The Art-Journal 43 (1881): 301-03.
“Herman van Swanevelt: Dulwich Picture Gallery.” RKD Studies (Netherlands Institute for Art History), 2024, n.p.
James, Henry. “The Dutch and Flemish Pictures in New York.” The Atlantic Monthly, 29, no. 176 (June 1872), 757-63.
Kilian, Jennfer. “Berchem, Nicolaes.” Grove, 3: 757-60.
Owen, Felicity, and David Blayney Brown. Collector of Genius: A Life of Sir George Beaumont. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Trezanni, Ludovica. “Jan Both.” Grove, 4: 485-89.

White, Christopher. The Dutch Paintings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen. Cambridge: Royal Club Trust, 1982.