Hercules Segers
Amsterdam, c. 1626 - c. 1627
line etching and drypoint, printed in blue on paper prepared with a brownish-grey (?), lead-based ground, coloured with light brown, bluish-green, light blue, white and dark blue paint
height c. 194 mm × width c. 331 mm (trimmed within the printed surface)
stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (L. 240)
One state.
Missing corner at upper right made up; missing corner at lower right; folds; the binding medium in the paints has discoloured considerably; the verso is dark yellow, with brown spotting, from the oil-based binding medium in the ground and the paint having permeated the paper.
…; collection Pieter Cornelis, Baron van Leyden (1717-1788), Leiden;1 his daughter, Françoise Johanna Gael-van Leyden (1745-1813), Leiden;2 from whom, en bloc, fl. 100,000, to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1778-1846), King of Holland, Amsterdam, for the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (L. 240), The Hague, 1807; transferred to the museum, 1816
Object number: RP-P-OB-838
Credit line: Transferred from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), 1816
Copyright: Public domain
Distant Views of Towns
Elongated, grand panoramas with views of Dutch villages and cities already enjoyed a rich tradition by the time Segers explored the subject in a number of paintings and etchings. At the end of the sixteenth century, Hans Bol (1534-1593) was making small landscapes in gouache with city profiles, including Amsterdam, in the background.3 In engraved city portraits by Pieter Bast (c. 1570-1605), the profiles of Amsterdam, Leiden and Franeker, for example, barely rise above the sweeping landscapes in which they are engulfed.4 This formula, in which a depiction of a city is virtually absorbed into – and even subordinate to the rendering of – the rural setting was strongly developed, especially in Haarlem.5 The most immediate models for Segers’s etchings of Dutch places appear to be the elongated landscape prints of villages and cities that Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630) and his nephew Jan van de Velde (1593-1641) made in Haarlem between 1615 and 1618 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-15.421).6
The oblong-format prints are characterized by their phenomenal sense of space. Just as in Segers’s prints, this effect was determined primarily by the seemingly random division of the landscape into shaded and sunlit sections. While the shadows in the prints by the Van de Veldes are etched, those in Segers’s prints are in drypoint. As is almost always the case, in Segers’s work human figures play a secondary role in contrast to the richly populated landscapes by Esaias and Jan van de Velde. With some difficulty, a wanderer and a group of people in a wagon can be discerned in the middle of Segers’s Amersfoort view (HB 30, inv. no. RP-P-OB-845). The only extant impression of the etching is printed in blue on paper prepared with a bluish-grey ground. The colouration contributes to the unnatural, hushed atmosphere of Segers’s etching and constitutes another principal difference with the landscape prints in black by his contemporaries.
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. 1589/90.7 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.8 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.9
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.10 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.11 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.12
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.13 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-?).14 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.15 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 1631.16 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).17 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.18 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.19
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’).20 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.21 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.22 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.23
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
One of Segers’s larger prints, the Valley with a River and a Town with Four Towers (HB 29), is of an altogether different order.24 The river valley encircled by hills with pastures and fields seems more civilized, with more buildings than any other landscape in his oeuvre, and gives the impression of a southern landscape. The three Gothic churches with towers, however, seem to belong to northern regions.25 A fourth tower, to which the print owes its traditional name, is reminiscent of a stronghold and is located on the hill at the right. In the middle of the landscape, in a peculiar place near the river, is a Renaissance building with pilasters and a pediment that also evokes associations with Italy.26
The odd combination of the landscape and architectural elements is difficult to fathom, as is the structure of the landscape and the town – or is it an agglomeration of three villages? The river separates the buildings around the church on the left from the houses and churches on the right bank. No trace of a bridge can be discerned. In contrast to the views of Amersfoort and Wageningen, all human presence is absent in this landscape, despite the many buildings and roads. The point of departure for the etching was probably the painting that is now reattributed to Segers (P 10, in an private collection, Belgium), with virtually the same composition.27 In its foreground are two – for Segers exceptionally large – figures. They have been eliminated in the etching and their function as repoussoirs was assumed by two large boulders. The landscape in the print is substantially reduced on both the left and right compared to that of the painting. This suggests that Segers made the print after the painting, rather than the reverse. Another difference has to do with the typical round building in the middle of the painting,28 replaced by a temple-like Renaissance structure in the etching. The nine known impressions of this print vary greatly in colour. The one closest to the painting is the impression in blue (HB 29a, inv. no. RP-P-OB-834), in which the roads, buildings and rocks are painted a claret red. The same passages are painted in brown, pink and red in the panel. This makes it even more plausible that it was Segers who wielded the brush here as well.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 26e (Die Stadt mit vier Türmen); C. Hofstede de Groot, 'Langs welken weg trok Hercules Seghers naar Italië?', Oud Holland 44 (1927), pp. 57-58, 64; E. Trautscholdt, Der Maler Herkules Seghers, Munich 1940, p. 82 (n. 3); L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 49-50; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 29e, and pp. 33 (incl. n. 20), 37, 45 (nn. 84 and 86), 49 (n. 111), 55; 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. 29e; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, Appendix 7, no. HB 29e; 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 29e
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Valley with a River and a Town with Four Towers [HB 29e], Amsterdam, c. 1626 - c. 1627', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200126273
(accessed 10 December 2025 08:05:58).