Roelant Savery

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Landscape with birds

Roelant Savery (or Roeland(t) Maertensz Saverij) (1576, Kortrijk - buried February 25, 1639, Utrecht), was a Flanders-born Dutch baroque painter of the Golden Age.

1 Life
2 Works
3 Sources
4 External links

[edit] Life

Like so many other artists, Savery's Anabaptist family fled North from the Spanish occupied Southern Netherlands when Roelant was about 4 years old and settled in Haarlem around 1585. He was taught painting by his older brother Jacob Savery (c.1565-1603) in Amsterdam.

After his schooling, Savery traveled to Prague around 1604, where he became court painter of the Emperors Rudolf II (1552-1612) and Mathias (1557-1619), who had made their court a center of mannerist art. Between 1606-1608 he traveled to Tyrol to study plants.

Before 1616 Savery moved back to Amsterdam, and in 1618 he settled in Utrecht, where he joined the artist's guild a year later. His nephew Hans would become his most important assistant.

In 1621 Savery bought a large house on the Boterstraat in Utrecht. The house had a large garden with flowers and plants, where a number of fellow painters were frequent visitors. Savery was friends with still life painters like Balthasar van der Ast and Ambrosius Bosschaert. In the 1620s he was one of the most successful painters in Utrecht, but later his life got troubled, perhaps because of alcoholism. Though he would have pupils until the late 1630s, amongst which Allaert van Everdingen and Roelant Roghman, he went bankrupt in 1638 and died half a year later. Savery never married.

[edit] Works

Savery primarily painted landscapes in the Flemish tradition of Gillis van Coninxloo, often embellished with many meticulously painted animals and plants, regularly with a mythological or biblical theme as background. He also painted multiple flower still lifes.

His unique style of painting, related to the then reigning Mannerism, has been highly popular with collectors and can be found in many museums in Europe and North America. His preparatory drawings are also valued highly.

Among his best-known works are several depictions of the now-extinct dodo painted in 1626 and 1628. His nephew Hans a.k.a. Jan Savery was also known for his paintings of the dodo (including a famous 1651 illustration currently held at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History), which he probably copied from his uncle's work.