Roelant Savery: the painter of the dodo, the bird that symbolizes the human capacity to destroy nature

At one point in

Alice in Wonderland

(1865), the fantasy novel written by the British Lewis Carroll, the girl encounters the dodo, a flightless bird native to Mauritius Island, in the Indian Ocean.

Presented standing and with a cane, John Tenniel's original illustration is based on the work of Roelant Savery (1586-1639), a painter of Flemish origin whose family emigrated to what is now the Netherlands during the 80 Years' War against Spain: the War of Flanders.

Savery was not the first to portray the bird, a symbol of a species extinct due to man, but he was the first to paint it several times.

The image that has prevailed for posterity is his.

The dodo now appears in the exhibition that the Mauritshuis Gallery, in The Hague, dedicates to the artist, a pioneer in painting and drawing landscapes and ordinary people that he had captured on the street, and in executing the oldest still life of flowers preserved on Dutch soil .

Titled

The Wonderful World of Roelant Savery,

the exhibition—open until May 20—achieves a multiplier effect with just 43 works.

There are drawings of landscapes and anonymous characters.

Paintings full of exotic animals, such as lions, cheetahs, rhinos or camels, along with others as domestic as cows in a stable.

And flowers.

Vases full of peonies, tulips, carnations or bluebells, accompanied by insects, lizards and even mice.

All full of life.

Including the ill-fated dodo, here plump and placid, who seems to pose without fear of humans.

Work by Roelant Savery: 'Vase with Flowers in a Stone Niche', 1615.Margareta Svensson

The Dutch docked at Mauritius in 1598 and the crew made the first sketches of the bird.

Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), Flemish physician and botanist, included a drawing in one of his natural history books in 1605.

“But as an artist, Savery's works make this species a very well-known one,” explains Ariane van Suchtelen, curator of the exhibition.

The dodo could not fly and had no natural enemies on the island, so it made its nest on the ground.

“Hunting him was easy.

And then there are the rats, cats, pigs and other animals that arrived on the ships, which ate the chicks and eggs.”

The painter captured it a dozen times and the image we have of the dodo is his, but with one caveat.

“It is likely that the specimen he saw was stuffed, because in reality the bird was much more slender.

His is plump and may be because the taxidermist put in too much filler to preserve it,” says Van Suchtelen.

Born in Kortrijk (Belgium), Savery first lived in the Dutch city of Haarlem and learned the painter's trade with his brother Jaques, ten years older, in Amsterdam.

Shortly after his death from the plague, Roelant traveled to Prague around 1603 to become the court painter of Emperor Rudolph II: Archduke of Austria, King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor.

Grandson of Charles V, he was a compulsive collector, the greatest of his time, who made Prague an artistic and scientific center in Europe.

He had a private zoo, art and objects of all kinds, and there, the painter met the dodo.

Roelant Savery: 'Two Horses and Grooms', 1628. Mauritshuis Gallery

Rudolf II not only collected to create a true microcosm in Prague.

Savery was the first of his class to be commissioned to go out into the countryside to capture the landscapes of the empire from nature.

He traveled to the Alps and made drawings of waterfalls, mountains, rocks, wild nature.

Later, he used it as preparatory work for the painted landscapes, like everyone else in his time, in his studio.

“As far as we know, it is the first time that an artist has been commissioned to collect landscapes in these conditions.

It is an important step for landscaping,” says the conservator.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the founder of the dynasty of painters, was the emperor's favorite painter.

So Savery was somewhat following that trend.

But while Bruegel, who also toured the Alps, “captures panoramic views, Savery was so close that you seem to get wet with the water of the waterfalls.”

“And that is rare and made it modern in its time,” says the same expert.

In the exhibition there are also several examples of drawings whose protagonists are peasants, beggars, women in the market, worshipers in the Prague synagogue.

He wrote down all kinds of details about clothing and colors to take advantage of later.

“This group of works, taken in the open air, is very famous.

They were first attributed to Pieter Bruegel, but later it was discovered that they were his,” says Van Suchtelen.

Rembrandt had an album of Savery's landscapes among his possessions.

Roelant Savery, 'Sleeping Young Man, Probably Pieter Boddaert', 1606/07. Mauritshuis Gallery

Flowers also occupy a very important space in his work.

“The oldest floral still life preserved in the Netherlands dates back to 1603 and is by Savery,” according to the curator.

It is possible that other artists, such as Jan Brueghel—Pieter's son—or Jacques de Gheyn, worked on their first compositions of this kind around that time.

“An artist is never alone, he always appears within a tradition.”

It was about showing as many specimens and colors as possible offered by nature.

“Entomology, the study of the smallest part of nature, was very important.

That's why they put a lot of insects among the flowers,” says the expert.

Around 1615, when Savery returned to the Netherlands upon the death of the emperor, he settled in Utrecht.

There he had a varied garden that was very useful for bequeathing to art entire vases so fragrant that today it makes you want to touch the petals.

Upon his return to the Netherlands, he worked for the free market and had some official commissions and assignments from aristocrats.

In Prague he also had to sell outside the court environment.

His main pupil was his nephew Hans, son of his deceased brother Jaques.

Single and very proud of his stay with the emperor, Roelant Savery executed some 250 drawings and nearly 300 paintings throughout his life.

His end, however, was as sad as Rembrandt's, that he died ruined.

In his case, he had mental problems and they took advantage of him.

In bankruptcy, he stopped painting and lost his house and his work.

Rediscovering it is the task of this exhibition.

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