Hagar and the Angel in an extensive landscape

A native of Woerden, near Utrecht, Swanevelt visited Paris in 1623 and shortly after moved to Italy, where he worked in Rome between 1629-41. In the present work, his northern style, influenced by Adam Elsheimer and Paul Bril (who died in Rome in 1626), is tempered with a clear daylight, found in many of Swanevelt's small-format early works. This picture is one of the earliest signed works in Swanevelt's oeuvre, dating to the second half of the 1620s, shortly after the artist arrived in Rome (A.C. Steland, loc. cit.). Steland notes that the particular formation of the treetops, the drawing of the foliage and the composition originate from Bril's Mountain Landscape with a Flock of Goats on a Rock at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (inv. no. 974), with the small, elongated figures typical of Swanevelt's earliest Roman works.