Over40 years of work and passion about Flemish painting have built our gallery a reputation made of talent and skills among demanding and cultured clients from museums and Flemish and Dutch schools collectors.
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Roelandt SAVERY
(Courtrai 1576–1630, Utrecht)
Paradise with a Dodo
Oil on copper
29 × 41 cm
Signed and dated 1627
Museums
Amsterdam, Bailleul, Berlin, Douai, Dresden, Frankfurt, London, Vienna…
With the return of the Spanish Inquisition and a century ahead of Diderot and the French Encyclopaedists, Jan Brueghel the Elder, his friends and the Savery family offer us a panorama of the species of flora and fauna. Bolstered by their friendship with Cardinal Borromeo and the ‘fantasia’ of Rudolf II of Prague, these painters open the great book of the future: that of a prophetic painting of ecology.
When Roelandt Savery depicts the abundance of the animal and plant worlds, the image is paradisiacal and echoes the fragility of our world today. This painting teems with observations and realistic depictions of animal behaviour, lending the whole scene a sense of humour and vitality. On the right, the now-extinct dodo, and at the centre of the painting, the rare bird of paradise, further enhance the significance of the testimony this painting offers today.
Born in 1576 in Kortrijk, Roelandt Savery was still very young when his family sought refuge in Haarlem and then in Amsterdam for religious reasons.Trained in painting by his elder brother Jacob, he entered the service of the Holy Roman Emperors, first Rudolf II and then Matthias I of Habsburg.
His painting is distinguished by the meticulous detail with which he depicts animals, observed at Rudolf II’s menagerie in Prague. Savery’s splendid bestiary is a fusion of a love of creation, knowledge of zoology, a magnificent bestiary painstakingly compiled by scholars who were often travellers, or through the observation of familiar and exotic animals at the Coudenberg Zoo – where Dürer himself came to sketch the wild animals from life – combined with the extreme charm and whimsy of scientific ethology, enhanced by the humour and imagination of ‘Velvet Brueghel’, Jacob and Roland Savery…
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