The Arch of Constantine, Rome

Born in the Netherlands, Swanevelt travelled to Rome in the early 1630s to join a group of artists who had established a new, lyrical style of landscape painting. The study of Rome's dilapidated classical ruins was essential to these artists, and Swanevelt here includes two men sketching in the bottom-right foreground, one of which could perhaps be the artist himself. Swanevelt's carefully observed drawings of the arch and its carvings allowed him to paint this work years later when he was living in Paris.