Hercules Segers
? Amsterdam, c. 1623 - c. 1625
line etching and drypoint, printed in black on paper, then coloured using lead-based, greyish-blue paint and yellow, purple and white paint, printed framing line at left, top and bottom; varnished
height c. 138 mm × width c. 202 mm (trimmed within the plate mark, but outside the printed surface, except on right)
One state.
Sharp, vertical fold across lowermost zone; the discoloured varnish on top of the yellow paint appears brown; the varnish on the recto has permeated the paper and coloured it brown in parts; verso: fragments of former mount.
...; collection Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708), Amsterdam;1 by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam (L. 11), 1708; on loan to the museum (L. 2228a), from 1885
Object number: RP-P-H-OB-819
Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
Small Mountain Landscapes: Variants Printed from One Plate
Although small in number, Segers’s impressions of large mountain landscapes (HB 3-6) nevertheless display a wide diversity of technique and use of materials. This applies even more so to the small mountain landscapes (HB 7-14).2 The few surviving impressions of the large landscapes strongly suggest that a significant share of Segers’s print production has been lost. The same suspicion arises when the extant impressions of the small mountain landscapes are compared. The number of known impressions varies from one (HB 11) or two (HB 9, HB 12 and HB 14) up to twenty-two (HB 13), more than of any other print by Segers,3 and even these impressions all differ, the result of Segers’s unremitting urge to experiment.
Strictly speaking, the small mountain landscapes display variations on the same themes and motifs he explored in the large mountain landscapes: views of a deep canyon or valley encircled by fanciful mountain ranges, sometimes sparsely dotted with buildings and tiny figures. By alternating compositions and motifs – but primarily through printing with various colours of ink on different prepared grounds and working up the images in brush in a range of colours – Segers lent every single landscape its own character and atmosphere. Most of these rocky landscapes look barren and desolate, and through the peculiar use of colour sometimes even alien (e.g. HB 7 II b, preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, inv. no. 1973.208, and HB 10 I b, in the British Museum, London, inv. no. S.5520). Other mountain views come across as more welcoming and cultivated (e.g. HB 10 II d, inv. no. RP-P-OB-821 and HB 10 II f, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 23.57.3). With their detailed colouring, the latter ones resemble little paintings. The composition of these two impressions differs substantially because in the one in New York (HB 10 II f) a large section has been trimmed on the left and even more so on the right. The regular occurrence of this phenomenon in prints by Segers and the fact that despite rigorous cropping the compositions are still convincing indicate that this was done by the artist himself to introduce variety in his creations. In all instances, the aim of the experimental and unorthodox methods seems to have been a quest for the greatest possible diversity.
Nevertheless, patterns and even a certain system can be discerned in the way in which Segers set about his work. A colour combination he often used in pulling prints, for example, is blue paper prepared with a pink ground (e.g. HB 7 II b, HB 7 II c, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, inv. no. 245681; HB 9 I a, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, inv. no. 245679; HB 10 I a, inv. no. RP-P-1961-868 and HB 10 I c, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, inv. no. RESERVE CB-49-BOITE ECU(ESTNUM 739)). From the limited number of known impressions, it cannot be determined whether he employed a prepared coloured ink and ground to print an edition of one and the same plate, or whether in one session he printed multiple plates. That the same colour combinations occur in impressions of different plates would seem to suggest the latter option (cf. HB 9 II b, HB 10 II d, HB 10 II e, HB 10 II f, and HB 9 I a, HB 10 I a and HB 10 I c). An advantage of working with several plates simultaneously is that a larger number of impressions can be made in a shorter timespan than continually printing and cleaning the same plate. Speed and efficiency characterize the way in which Seger printed his etchings, as well as working them up with paint and brush. Segers will have probably also used paint prepared for this purpose to colour impressions of different plates, possibly even of prints he had made earlier and had in stock (HB 7 II b, HB 19a-d and HB 21 II c in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden, inv. no. A 49371).
Distinct from the fluid and sometimes even coarse elaboration of the impressions with brush are the often very refined and laborious graphic techniques Segers used to work his copper-plates. This is true for the tones he created in drypoint. Earlier artists, such as for example Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), had already employed drypoint to create tonal effects.4 However, the way in which Segers deployed this technique has no precedent. This applies to the Rocky Landscape with a Village and a High Tower, which he first etched and printed (HB 7 I a, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-818) and subsequently provided with passages of shade in delicate drypoint hatching (HB 7 II b-c). Some prints are known only in impressions with these kinds of additions in drypoint (e.g. HB 8-11). In these instances, first impressions were most likely made only of the etched plate, but these have not come down to us. Passages in drypoint wear relatively quickly. Yet with Segers, this wearing is not in proportion to the number of extant impressions.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
Hercules Segers (Haarlem c. 1589/90 - ? 1633/40)
No baptismal record has been found, but he was probably born in Haarlem in c. 1589/90.5 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.6 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.7
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.8 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.9 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.10
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.11 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-?).12 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.13 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 1631.14 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).15 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.16 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.17
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’).18 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.19 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.20 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.21
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
Two related prints (HB 8 and HB 9) are known in only two impressions each. The present Mountain Valley with Tree Stumps and the Remains of a Ship in the Foreground (HB 8) is printed from a plate in which a ship’s mast and ropes are visible on the right. Comparable rigging occurs in two other prints (e.g. HB 17 I a, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-805 and HB 21 II d, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-825). They are fragments of a large plate with a depiction of a ship that Segers cut down and reused for three smaller etchings of mountain landscapes. That Segers did not burnish away traces of the earlier depiction but left them intact is unusual to say the least. In the present etching, he made effective use of the ‘accidental’ form by adding some tree branches and a trunk to the mast and ropes. In the variant of this etching, the Mountain Valley, at the Right a Man Carrying a Stick (e.g. HB 9 II b, inv. no. RP-P-OB-820), a tree with a virtually identical branch is drawn at the upper right. Segers, thus, twice took advantage of the accidental remains of the initial plate.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 15; W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, p. 83; R. Grosse, Die holländische Landschaftskunst, 1600-1650, 2nd edn., Stuttgart 1925, p. 103; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 74-75; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 8 a, and pp. 30-31, 34, 39 (incl. n. 49), 43, 45 (incl. n. 84), 49 (n. 107), 54; 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. 8 a; 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 8a
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Mountain Valley with Tree Stumps and the Remains of a Ship in the Foreground [HB 8a], Amsterdam, c. 1623 - c. 1625', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37245
(accessed 20 September 2024 02:15:02).