The Four Large Mountain Landscapes
Four of Segers’s etchings of mountain landscapes (HB 3-6) are significantly larger than his other extant prints. With their dimensions of approximately 300 x 500 mm or more, they are as big, if not bigger, than his small paintings. Two of these etchings have come down to us in unique impressions, both kept in the British Museum, London (HB 3, inv. no. 1840,0808.229 and HB 5, inv. no. S.5535); the others (HB 4 and HB 6) are known in four and six impressions, respectively. One impression was probably destroyed in the bombing of Munich on 12 July 1944 (HB 6 I c, formerly in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, inv. no. 9412), while another was discovered only recently and is kept in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid (HB 4 II d, inv. no. 41954). All four present a distant view in a valley enclosed by mountains and rocks. This similarity notwithstanding, the etchings vary greatly in both composition and atmosphere. A fairly barren and inhospitable setting with just a few buildings is depicted in three of them (HB 3-5), while one (HB 6), of which the museum has two impressions, presents a more cultivated and inhabited landscape. The great differences in atmosphere are due primarily to the colours of the ink and the way in which they are printed and sometimes worked up with the brush.
Segers’s mountain landscapes spring from the tradition of the sixteenth-century world landscapes developed by South Netherlandish painters such as Joachim Patinir (1480/85-1524), Lucas Gassel (1500-1568), Cornelis Metsijs (1510/11-1556/57) and Herri met de Bles (c. 1500-1553), which were continued and embroidered upon by Matthijs Cock (1509-1548), Gillis Mostaert (c. 1530-1598), Lucas Valckenborch (1535-1597), Kerstiaen de Keuninck (1560-1632), Hans Bol (1534-1593), Joos de Momper (1564-1635) and Segers’s teacher, Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1606/07).
The most immediate predecessors of Segers’s monumental prints are the large etchings with mountain landscapes after designs by Pieter Bruegel (1526/30-1569), which were executed around 1555 by the brothers Johannes (1528/32-1605) and Lucas van Doetecum (active 1554-72-before 1589) and published by Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570) in Antwerp (see inv. no. RP-P-OB-7364). Segers must have been very familiar with these works, as well as with later large landscape prints such as the engravings after paintings by Van Coninxloo and David Vinckboons (1576-1631). However, in technique and subject, the latter were less relevant for him than the monumental etchings after Bruegel’s drawings.
Bruegel made the drawings on which these prints are based when he returned from his journey through the Alps. In general, they do not depict exact locations, but are interpretations of the overwhelming impressions the vertiginous mountains must have made on an artist from the flatlands of the Duchy of Brabant. Four prints include saints or biblical figures and thus fit squarely into the tradition of the originally religious world landscape; others are populated with secular travellers. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of the large landscape etchings after Bruegel. In his Schilderboeck of 1604 Karel van Mander (1548-1606) praised the prints for their fidelity to nature and held them up as models for young artists, who thus without having to travel themselves could learn how to depict the rocky Alps and the dizzying depths of valleys, steep cliffs, tall pine trees, distant horizons and rushing streams. The subjects of the mountain views in Segers’s four large etchings are very close, and sometimes even seem to literally borrow from them. The layout of the composition and the space of Segers’s Mountain Valley with Dead Pine Trees and a City in the Background (HB 3, British Museum, London, inv. no. 1840,0808.229) strongly recalls Bruegel’s construction of his distant views with mounds, boulders and tree stumps in the foreground, paths and rivers winding through the landscape, and distant vistas in deep valleys that meet up with mountains in the background (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-7356). In his print, Segers employed the same motifs to lead the viewer’s eye into the landscape and to guide it along the road in the foreground, past the dead trees, to the city in the middle ground and the walls extending across the hills at the right, and further into the distance towards the lake or river and the mountain ridge in the background. The stronghold on the cliff at the left is also a recurring motif in Bruegel’s prints.
While comparable with respect to format and the suggestion of space and depth, there are also significant differences between the large landscape etching after Bruegel and those by Segers. The prints by the Van Doetecum brothers measure approximately 320 x 420 mm and thus are taller and less wide than the elongated etching plates on which Segers worked (approx. 300 x 500 mm). Only Bruegel’s Large Alpine Landscape (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-7364), measuring 368 x 468 mm, comes close to the formats Segers used. In the mountain landscapes after Bruegel, the beholder’s vantage point is very high up and overlooks deep valleys from a bird’s-eye perspective; the horizon is always located in the upper half of the composition. Segers, by contrast, generally chose a substantially lower viewpoint and a horizon only one-third or one-quarter above the lower edge, but the British Museum's Mountain Valley with Dead Pine Trees and a City in the Background (HB 3) has a fairly high horizon and in terms of its compositional layout comes closer to Bruegel. Yet here, as well, the viewer has the sense of looking into the landscape from the foreground, rather than soaring above it. The combination of a low vantage point and a horizon with towering mountains or cliffs is a constant in Segers’s landscapes.
The Van Doetecum brothers translated Bruegel’s landscapes onto the copper-plate with crisp etched lines that create the impression of a copper-engraving. By comparison, Segers’s mountain landscapes are much more freely and spontaneously executed. The structure of stones, tree stumps, fields, roads and buildings is defined by a tangle of wriggling lines and fragments of lines, streaks and stipples that seem almost to have developed organically. The impressions of Bruegel prints published by Cock are neat and tidy; Segers’s large prints exhibit streaks and spots from foul biting and are printed from plates that were incompletely wiped, resulting in ink stains and plate tone. In terms of drawing and etching technique, the Mountain Valley with Dead Pine Trees and a City in the Background (HB 3) is the least subtle in the group of four large mountain landscapes. The schematic rendering, the scale of the buildings and the somewhat routine motif of the stronghold on the cliff strongly recall the prints after Bruegel, suggesting that it is the earliest of the four etchings. Determining a chronology for Segers’s prints, however, is problematic at best. Motifs such as the road with cart tracks, tree stumps, dead, or cypress-type trees feature in various prints. Moreover, in both motif and composition, the etching is related to Segers’s early paintings in the Rijksmuseum (P 7, inv. no. SK-A-3120) and in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (P 8, inv. no. 1033).
The composition the River Valley with Four Trees (e.g. HB 4 II d) agrees with that of Segers’s painting in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (P 8), albeit in reverse. Compared to the etching, the painting is missing the top of the cliff and part of the sky, most likely because a strip of approximately 6.5 cm was cut from the panel. The painting’s composition, on the other hand, is broader and has a somewhat larger rocky outcropping.
Investigations of its extremely free underdrawing show that, while painting the panel, Segers introduced all kinds of changes in the houses, trees and figures. In the print these details (e.g. in the houses and trees) correspond to the finished painting, indicating that the print was made after the panel. The height of the original painting must have been the same as this print and the other large etched mountain landscapes, namely approximately 28.5 cm, thus the same height as the painting in the Rijksmuseum (P 7, inv. no. SK-A-3120). It is entirely possible that the three other Large Landscapes were also made after paintings that are no longer known. Two large etchings have come down to us in unique impressions only (HB 3 and 5), with no corresponding painted model. It is thus conceivable that Segers executed other similar compositions, both as paintings and etched versions, which have been lost. The appearance of one such untraced painting is known thanks to a rapidly executed sketch by Leonaert Bramer (1596-1674) kept in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1886-A-704). It belongs to a group of sheets from circa 1652-53 in which Bramer drew copies of 107 paintings (mostly landscapes) that were then in the possession of Delft burghers, dealers and artists. Bramer’s drawing of a painting by 'harceles Segers' features a mountain landscape with a diagonally winding river and a distant view that strongly resembles the painting in The Hague (P 8). Besides painted and etched versions of the same composition, Segers thus also seems to have made painted variants of related inventions.
Printed on the verso of the impression of the River Valley with Four Trees in London (HB 4 I b, inv. no. S.5534) is an impression of the Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields (HB 6 I b). This is a 'maculature' impression: without being re-inked, a plate is covered with a sheet of damp paper and put through the press again. Generally this was done to clean the plate of residues of ink, but in this case it was intended to print an impression. Despite the small amount of ink still remaining on the plate, the lines are so crisp that all of the details are visible. It gives the impression of being a pen drawing in grey ink. Because of an accidental fold in the paper during printing, a section remained blank on the left, which was then filled in with brush and grey ink. The framing line in grey also joins up seamlessly with the impression. It is difficult to determine whether this double-sided sheet was discovered after Segers’s death, when studio material, including plates, might have been circulating, or whether the artist himself produced such experimental prints for art lovers, though the first option seems most probable.
The large mountain landscapes seem to be ideally suited for printing on linen and being worked up with brush and paint and transformed into 'paintings' to hang on the wall - what may well correspond to what Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) described as 'printed paintings'. If Segers indeed produced such cheap, yet less durable alternatives for paintings on canvas, their chances of survival would have been much smaller than impressions printed on paper. After hanging on the wall for some time, they must have faded and been thrown out. That Segers made 'printed paintings' of his large mountain landscapes is therefore difficult to prove. And yet, given the investment in material and labour, it is difficult to imagine that he would have produced his monumental etchings only to pull a single or a few impressions on paper. The Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields (HB 6) is related to the much smaller etching of The Enclosed Valley (HB 13). This print has survived in twenty-two impressions, ten of which on cloth, probably produced for collectors’ albums. Other similarities with Segers’s painting in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (P 5, inv. no. 1303) can be pointed out. These include the angular, rocky foreground, the form of the rocky outcroppings (in the print at the left and in the painting at the right), but primarily the view over the plain with fields and buildings and the vast sense of depth and space.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016