Hercules Segers
? Amsterdam, c. 1622 - c. 1625
line etching, printed from two plates on thin white paper, coloured with transparent, dark blue paint, probably first the original etching plate was printed in black and then the tone plate in a pale, lead-based yellow (lead-tin yellow)
height c. 143 mm × width c. 105 mm (trimmed within the printed surface)
Second state of three (printed from two plates: a tone plate has been added to the original etching plate and used to print the highlights).
Damage to the layer of blue paint at top left has caused the white paper to be exposed; the verso is light blue from the blue paint having permeated the paper; remnants of glue or grey ground across entire sheet; top left corner torn off but re-attached.
...; collection Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708), Amsterdam;1 by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam (L. 11), 1708; from which on loan to the museum (L. 2228a), since 1885
Object number: RP-P-H-OB-800
Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
Hercules Segers (Haarlem c. 1589/90 - ? 1633/40)
No baptismal record has been found, but he was probably born in Haarlem in c. 1589/90.2 The artist mentioned his age twice: once in 1614 stating he was a twenty-four-year-old man from Haarlem and once in 1623 were he mentions he is about thirty-four years old.3 His parents, Pieter Segers (c. 1564-1611/12) and Cathelijne Hercules (d. after 1618), both came from Ghent. Hercules was most likely their second son, since he was named after the patronymic of his mother. Whether he had more siblings than his younger brother, Laurens (c. 1592/93-after 1616), is not known.4
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.5 The denomination of the family is unknown, but mostly likely they were not Mennonites, as often claimed in the literature. Hercules became an apprentice of the painter Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1606/07), a landscape artist from Antwerp, who had a workshop at his house on the Oude Turfmarkt.6 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.7
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.8 In the summer of 1614 Segers was again documented as living in Amsterdam, together with his extramarital daughter, Nelletje Hercules (?-?). At the age of twenty-four, he married the forty-year-old Anna van der Bruggen (c. 1574-?).9 Apparently, he was doing well financially, able in 1619 to purchase a large new house on the Lindengracht in Amsterdam called De Hertog van Gelre.10 In his etching View through the Window of Segers’s House toward the Noorderkerk (HB 41, inv. no RP-P-H-OB-857), he captured the view from a window in the attic of that house. A decade later, his fortunes changed and he had to sell his house and dismantle his workshop. He moved to Utrecht in 1631.11 Segers seems to have been active as an art dealer. In May 1631 he sold around 137 paintings to the Amsterdam dealer Jean Antonio Romiti (?-?), including a painting by the young Rembrandt (1606-1669).12 In 1632 he was living in The Hague and was involved in the sale of about 180 paintings. The only other evidence of his stay there are two documents of 1633, one concerning the art deal and the other regarding the rental of a house.13 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.14
Segers addressed himself multiple times as painter, such as on 28 January 1633 when he was mentioned as ‘painter, at present living in The Hague’ (‘schilder, jegenwoordigh wonende alhier in Den Hage’).15 However, it is his highly original printed oeuvre to which the artist owes his present day fame. Although he specialized in mountain landscapes, it is doubtful if he ever saw a mountain in real life. His depictions of ancient Italian ruins all derive from prints by other artists, and it is unlikely he travelled to Italy himself.
One painting by Segers suggests that he travelled to the Southern Netherlands. His topographical View of Brussels from the Northeast in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne (P 16, inv. no. WRM Dep. 249) is in all probability a reflection of a visit to that city.16 His landscapes and city views depicting places in the provinces of Holland, Utrecht and Gelderland are also most likely based on personal observations and drawings ‘from life’.
Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) was the only contemporary to write about Segers. In his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkunst (Introduction to the Academy of Painting) of 1678, he described an artist who had great talent but did not receive much recognition during his life. Shortly after his death, however, his prints were most sought after by art lovers who were willing to pay enormous prices for impressions of his prints.17 However this may be, there are indications that Segers’s work was appreciated during his lifetime and well into the seventeenth century by a small group of art lovers and artists.18
The paintings that can be attributed to Segers with certainty are a Woodland Path in a private collection in Norway, four mountain landscapes (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Mauritshuis, The Hague; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), five Dutch panoramic landscapes (two in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, on loan from a private collection; private collection in the Netherlands), four hybrid landscapes (private collection in Brussels; Galerie Hans, Hamburg; Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and a View of Brussels (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne). His etchings are extremely rare. In total fifty-three different etchings have survived in 182 impressions – twenty-two of which are unique. Twenty-four of the known etchings depict mountain landscapes, two Biblical scenes, eight panoramic landscapes, six forest-landscapes and trees, eleven ruins and other buildings, four seascapes and ships, and three extraordinary prints show a rearing horse, a skull and a still life with books.
The chronology of Segers’s oeuvre is hard to determine because none of his works is dated. His development as an artist between 1615 and 1630 has traditionally been described as that of a specialist in mountain landscapes based on the tradition set by Pieter Bruegel (1526/30-1569) and his successors towards a pioneer in Dutch panoramic landscapes. Dendrochronological research on the panels he used, however, suggests that Segers made different types of work throughout his career. He created a new kind of panoramic views with a lowered horizon and impressive skies that anticipated the works of the younger generation of specialists in Dutch landscapes, such as Pieter de Molijn (1595-1661) and Jan van Goyen (1596-1656). Simultaneously he created, both in painting and etching, fantastic mountain views and mountain landscapes.
Segers’s graphic experiments with tone and colour are closely related to his work as a painter. The materials he used for his prints, such as pigments, priming and linen, are what one expects to find in a seventeenth-century painter’s workshop rather than in that of a printmaker. Segers’s etchings bear witness to an exceptionally inventive use of printmaking techniques. No printmaker before him had experimented on such a grand scale with the possibilities of copper-plates, etching grounds, etching needles and other graphic tools or with printing and touching-up in colour.
Jaap van der Veen, 2016/Huigen Leeflang, 2020
References
A. Bredius, ‘Iets over Hercules Segers’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis. Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers…, 7 vols., Rotterdam, 1877-90, IV (1882), pp. 314-15; I.H. van Eeghen, ’De ouders van Hercules Segers’, Maandblad Amstelodamum 55 (1968), no. 4, pp. 73-76; J.Z. Kannegieter, ‘Het huis van Hercules Segers op de Lindengracht te Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 59 (1942), nos. 5/6, pp. 150-57; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, II, p. 1035; J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roeloefs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, pp. 17-36; H. Leeflang, ‘”For he also printed paintings”: Hercules Segers’s Painterly Prints’, in ibid., pp. 39-73; P. Roeloefs, ‘Hercules Segers, the Painter’, in ibid, pp. 111-38
A view in which the beholder’s eye is led along a winding road past some trees into depth is the subject of two of Segers’s most sensitive small etchings (HB 25 and HB 26, e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-801). The present composition, Landscape with a Plateau, a River in the Distance (HB 25), was executed in line etching in two phases. First, Segers drew and etched the landscape in thin lines and stipples. For the second biting, he added more powerful lines and accents. The differences are clear to see in the branches of the trees on the left and in the overgrowth in the middle, which separates the plateau from the view over the river. The diminutive boats, islands and breakwaters testify to Segers’s delicate touch and perfectionism with the etching needle.
Recent research has demonstrated that the unique first state of the little etching, also in the Rijksmuseum (HB 25 I a, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-799), is printed on oriental paper. Insofar as is known, Segers was thus the first artist to use such paper in Europe, more than twenty years earlier than Rembrandt did, who began printing on Japanese paper from 1646.19
The present work, which is the second impression of the etching (HB 25 II b), is just as exceptional. It is printed in black ink on paper painted blue. The pale yellow highlights on the rocks, buildings, vegetation and horizon are not painted, but precisely printed in register from a separate plate that Segers made specially for this purpose.20 This so-called register print in etching is also unique and is one of the earliest examples of this intaglio printmaking technique.21 Thanks to the blue, black and yellow, the print looks like a nocturnal moonlit scene.
Curiously, only a single impression of this particularly successful experiment has been preserved. Segers subsequently reworked the first plate with the landscape and introduced a myriad of etched crosshatched shadows in various places (HB 25 III c, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden, inv. no. A 49369). The white reserved passages have approximately the same function as the highlights in the impression from two plates. There was no longer any need to print highlights with the second plate, a clear indication that Segers had abandoned this idea. Only one other etching Segers printed from two plates has come down to us (HB 42, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-858), but in this register print he proceeded with a different goal in mind.22
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
J.G.A. Frenzel, ‘Herkules Zegers, Zeitgenosse Paul Potter’s: Maler und Kupferstecher und Erfinder der Kunst, durch Kupferabdrücke mit mehreren Farben Gemälde nachzuahmen‘, Kunst-Blatt. [Beilage zu] Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Stuttgart) 23 [Morgenblatt 10], 1829, no. 2; G.K. Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon oder Nachrichten von dem Leben und den Werken der Maler, Bildhauer, Kupferstecher, Formschneider, Lithographen, 22 vols., Munich 1832-52, XXII (1852), no. 2; J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 4b (Die hügelige Landschaft in die Höhe); W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, pp. 56, 60-61; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 33, 101; J. Houplain, ‘Sur les estampes d’Hercules Seghers‘, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, no. 49 (1957), p. 157 (fig. 2); E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 25 I b and pp. 33, 36, 45 (incl. nn. 84 and 86), 54; J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, no. 26; I.M. de Groot, Landschappen. Etsen van de Nederlandse meesters uit de zeventiende eeuw, Amsterdam 1979, no. 46; F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, XXVI (1981; Hercules Segers), no. 25 I b; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, pp. 138-39, and Appendix 7, no. HB 25 II a (sic); A. Stijnman, Engraving and Etching, 1400-2000: A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes, London and Houten 2012, p. 356 (fig. 288); H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, no. HB 25 II b
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Landscape with a Plateau, a River in the Distance [HB 25 II b], Amsterdam, c. 1622 - c. 1625', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37268
(accessed 10 November 2024 00:59:27).