Roelant Savery
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Roelant Savery (or Roeland(t) Maertensz Saverij, or de Savery, or many variants ) (1576, Kortrijk - buried February 25, 1639, Utrecht), was a Flanders-born Dutch Golden Age painter.
Works
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; bouquets in stone niches, sometimes with lizards, insects or fallen petals and regarded as his best work.
His unique style of painting, related to the then reigning Mannerism, has been highly popular with collectors and can be found in many museums in Europe and North America. His preparatory drawings are also valued highly.
Among his best-known works are several depictions of the now-extinct dodo painted between 1611 and 1628. His nephew Hans a.k.a. Jan Savery was also known for his paintings of the dodo (including a famous 1651 illustration currently held at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History), which he probably copied from his uncle's work.