Herman van Swanevelt

In Rome, the fellowship of Dutch and Flemish painters gave each member a nickname, and Herman van Swanevelt's was the Hermit. He apparently earned it by going off alone into the countryside around the city to draw its ruins and woods. He lived in Rome from 1629 to 1641, and his landscapes, with trees standing against the low light of morning or evening, found buyers quickly. The Barberini family, relatives of Pope Urban VIII, were among his patrons, and he painted large landscapes for the Buen Retiro, Philip IV of Spain's new palace in Madrid, for the same series as Claude Lorrain, the French landscape painter then working in Rome.

He was born around 1600 in Woerden, a small town between Utrecht and Leiden, and nothing certain is known about his training. In 1641 he moved to Paris, and apart from visits home to Woerden he stayed there for the rest of his life. He helped decorate the Hôtel Lambert, a grand private house on the Île Saint-Louis, was admitted to the royal academy of painting and made more than a hundred etchings of Italian scenery.

He died in Paris in 1655, in his house on the rue du Temple.