Roelandt Savery
Nationality: Dutch
Born: 1576, Kortrijk, Netherlands
Died: 1639-02-25

Rolant Savery was born in Kortrijk, Netherlands in 1576. He was an important Dutch painter of landscapes, animals and flower still-lifes. He was a court painter to the emperor Rudolph II. Under the influence of Jan Brueghel and G. van Conixloo he painted forest landscapes with jungle-like fantastic rocks and ruins, the scene being further enlivened by tame and wild animals, which he was the first Dutch artist to paint, in a somewhat mannered style. The occasion for these was afforded by frequent representations of Paradise, Noah's Ark and the Flood, or Orpheus charming the beasts. Sometimes he also introduced small Biblical or genre-type figures. His hunting scenes and mountain landscapes suggest that he knew the Alps. His very tasteful bouquets are generally depicted in a stone niche and animated with lifelike frogs, lizards, and grasshoppers, beetles and butterflies. They are more tonal and realistic than contemporary flower pictures of Jan Brueghel or Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, which together with them mark the beginning of the great age of Dutch flower painting. He died in Utrecht in 1639.

Source: Bernt, Walter. The Netherlandish Painters of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Phaidon, 1948.