Landscape with Hermit bound in Chains
1634 - 1639. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
This painting entered the Museum`s holdings as a copy of a work by Jan Both, described as Saint Francis in Penitence and listed as the companion piece to Landscape with Saint Francis in Meditation. It was later catalogued as an anonymous work of the Germanic schools and from 1910 onwards as an anonymous Flemish work. However, this landscape can be identified with one of the pictures described in the 1701 inventory of the Palace of the Buen Retiro as executed by el Yttaliano and hitherto regarded as lost, giving rise to its attribution to Herman van Swanevelt.
The landscape is leafier than the previous ones. The handling of the leaves and the trunks and branches of the trees is characteristic of an Swanevelt. The tree with branches that are almost dry in the mid-ground, on the right, is similar to the one that serves as a repoussoir on the left side of Landscape with Saint Francis in Meditation (P2035) or that which appears in Landscape with Figures on a Bridge in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. The exuberant vegetation also links it with some of the landscapes executed by this painter now housed in that gallery.
The figure of the hermit almost blends into the landscape. It resembles a tree branch. Unlike what happens in the previous landscapes, it is not located to one side but in the centre of the composition, as in the landscapes for the same series by Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet. It has not been possible to obtain an X-ray image of the painting and therefore it cannot be ascertained whether the figure is superimposed over the landscape. Whatever the case, it would appear to be of the same type as the figure in Landscape with Saint Francis in Meditation (P2035) and Landscape with Carmelites (P2058) by Jan Both, whose stylistic proximity to the series of hermits engraved by Andries Both makes it possible to attribute them to this painter (Posada Kubissa, T.: Pintura holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Catálogo razonado. 2009, p. 328).
