The Savery family were Protestants from Kortrijk (Courtrai), who fled to the northern Netherlands when the town fell to the Spanish in 1580. Roelandt Savery worked for his entire career in the Dutch cities of Haarlem, Amsterdam and Utrecht, except for the decade he spent at the court of Rudolph II in Prague (1603-13). While in Prague Savery must have encountered Jan Brueghel (who was there in 1604); he studied Rudolph’s menagerie and made a trip to the mountainous Tyrol region in 1606-8, which he recorded in numerous topographical drawings.

Roelandt Savery and his brother Jacques both painted the animals in Eden in the encyclopaedic manner of Jan Brueghel’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (RCIN 405512). This landscape displays a similar interest in natural history - many species of bird can be recognised, including herons, storks and bitterns - but this is no Eden. We are in the depths of a pathless and swampy forest, a place of fear. This is the Urwalt, which haunted the European imagination from Albrecht Aldorfer to Wagner. The ruin, which clearly prompts a meditation upon decay and death, provides the most obvious contrast with the fruit trees of Eden. Savery expresses the fear and fascination of this scene with a linear (almost graphic) application of paint, creating tangled Gothic patterns reminiscent of the prints of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), which were much admired in Prague at this time. Karel van Mander writes appreciatively of the depiction of a nightmarish form of nature, which has echoes with both these Savery landscapes: cascades fall like drunken men; irregularly shapes stones hang like icicles, and trees ‘have fallen down so awkwardly you scarcely believe it in a dream’.

Signed and dated 1615 (which could be read 1612)