(Courtrai 1589–1654/55 Utrecht)
A wooded landscape with numerous exotic birds including a dodo,
signed lower centre: Savrij Fe.,
oil on panel, 62 x 110 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Netherlands;
with S. Nijstad, The Hague;
with Douwes Fine Art, Amsterdam

Joaneath Spicer, Baltimore, having inspected the present painting in the original, has confirmed it to be an autograph work by Hans Savery II. She dates it to the period between 1625 and 1630.

When Hans Savery’s father Jacob died of the plague in 1603, the boy, then fourteen years old, was taken in by his uncle, Roelandt Savery. Hans accompanied him to the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, where Roelandt worked as imperial court painter until 1612. In 1618, Roelandt Savery took to painting his famous Paradise landscapes populated not only by numerous naturalistically rendered animals, but also by such fabulous creatures as the unicorn or the legendary dodo, a bird spotted by explorers and sailors on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Later on, Roelandt Savery and his nephew Hans lived and worked together in Utrecht, where Roelandt died in 1639. In his final years, Roelandt was in weak health both physically and mentally, so that Hans had to finish several of his uncle’s works. It is almost impossible to differentiate between the works of the two Saverys dating from that period. The signature in the present painting corresponds to the one in a painting that was sold at Sotheby’s, London, in December 1999 and which Joaneath Spicer endorsed as an autograph work by Hans Savery.

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus, see fig. 1) was a flightless bird that was exclusively endemic to the island of Mauritius and measured approximately one metre in height. It was a ground nester subsisting on fermenting fruit. No natural enemies lived in its ecosystem. However, when the Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century, they introduced rats and such feral animals as pigs and monkeys. They plundered the dodo’s nests and ate its eggs, which were also a welcome change on the menus of sailors. The birds as such were considered inedible, so it is not surprising that no bones of the dodo have been found in archaeological excavations. For these reasons, the dodo had already become extinct by around 1690. Lewis Carroll mentioned the bird in 1865 in his book “Alice in Wonderland”, which contributed to the dodo’s popularity, as did the English saying “as dead as a dodo”. Roelandt and Hans Savery depicted the exotic bird repeatedly, although it has to be conceded that they had no precise idea of its appearance.