Roelandt Jacobsz Savery Biography | Oil Paintings

After his schooling, Roelant Jacobsz Savery traveled to Prague in 1604, where he became court painter first to Emperors Rudolf II and then to the Holy Roman Emperor Mathias, who had made their court a center of Mannerist art. Between 1606-1608 he traveled to Tyrol to study plants. Gillis d'Hondecoeter became his pupil.

By 1616 Roelant Savery moved back to Amsterdam and lived in the Sint Antoniesbreestraat neighborhood, but two years later he moved to Utrecht, where he joined the Artist's Guild of Saint Luke a year later. His nephew Hans would become his most important assistant. Roelant Jacobsz Savery was friends with still life painters like Balthasar van der Ast and Ambrosius Bosschaert.

Roelant Jacobsz 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, regarded as his best work, bouquets in stone niches, sometimes with lizards or insects.

Roelant Savery is famous for being the most prolific and influential illustrator of the now-extinct dodo bird, having made at least ten portrayals. A famous painting of his from 1626, now called Edwards' Dodo as it was once owned by the ornithologist George Edwards, has since become the standard image of a dodo.

During the 1620s he was one of the most successful painters in Utrecht and though he would have pupils until the late 1630s, among them Allaert van Everdingen and Roelant Roghman, because of heavy drinking he lost focus and went bankrupt in 1638 and died in Utrecht half a year later.

Art Movement: Mannerism Art.
Artists Influencing Roelant Jacobsz Savery: Jacob Savery, Hans Bol.
He Traveled To Czech Rep.
Painters Roelant Savery Influenced: Gillis d'Hondecoeter.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.