Roelandt Savery

Kuranda collection, Vienna (according to the 1965 sale catalogue);

Empress Zita (1892–1989), wife of Emperor Charles of Austria, Ham Castle, Steenokkerzeel, near Brussels;

Andre Simon, Château de Bosquet, Gembloux, 1952;

Anonymous sale, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2–4 June 1965, lot 32 (as signed lower left);

Marcel de Merre, 15 July 1997;

Thence by inheritance.

This unpublished panel depicts some of Roelandt Savery's favourite motifs: wild animals. Although prides of lions are relatively common in Savery's œuvre,¹ this appears to be the only known painting to focus solely on leopards. Here a group of leopards in a landscape – with one pair apparently protecting their crowded lair from a lone challenger on the opposite bank of a stream – is surveyed by a variety of exotic birds, including a red macaw. Savery delighted in painting such beasts, sometimes in rather incongruous surroundings based on his travels around the Tyrol, and they often occupy paradise landscapes, or scenes in which a religious subject, such as Saint Jerome, is subordinated to the depiction of the fauna. Large groups of such creatures as subjects in their own right tend to appear in his paintings after 1618, and the present panel probably dates to the early to mid-1620s.

Although the painting was most likely executed following Savery's return to the Northern Netherlands – first to Amsterdam in 1616, and subsequently to Utrecht in 1618 – the inspiration for this subject surely derives from Savery's familiarity with the menagerie of Rudolf II in Prague, at whose court he worked between 1604 and 1613. There Savery studied the astounding array of animals kept by the Emperor, and the drawings he made subsequently served as models throughout the rest of his career.

¹ See, for example, the panel in the Royal Collection, inv. no. RCIN 405627: https://www.rct.uk/collection/405627/lions-in-a-landscape