Six landscapes with the story of Adonis. Plate 5. The death of Adonis., Herman van Swanevelt, artist, 1654, France, etching, Like many other Dutch artists of his day, Herman van Swanevelt (1602-1655) spent many years in Rome, where there was a community of artists from Holland, Flanders, France and Germany. There he specialised in highly composed Italianate landscape paintings for a royal and aristocratic clientele. Landscape painting came into vogue as an independent genre in Italy in the early 17th century, and its greatest practitioners tended to be northern European trained or influenced. Paul Bril, like Swanevelt, was Dutch, Nicolas Poussin was French, and perhaps the most famous of them all, Claude Lorraine, was from Lorrain/Lorraine in eastern France but then part of the Holy Roman Empire.