Hercules Segers, after Hendrick Goltzius
? Amsterdam, c. 1615 - c. 1630
line etching, printed in dark grey on paper prepared with a thick, light bluish-grey, lead-based ground, coloured with paint in transparent light grey and opaque dark grey
height c. 76 mm × width c. 148 mm (trimmed outside the printed surface, except on left)
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the City of Amsterdam (L. 11)
One state.
The thick ground has cracks over the entire surface; a piece of the ground has come loose in the lower left corner and partially been put back; the paper is torn on the edge, right of the centre; light brown spotting in various places; verso: lined with eighteenth-century (?) paper.
...; 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-863
Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
Seascapes and Ships
Seascapes and ships would not seem to be the most obvious subjects for a painter specialized in mountain landscapes. Yet a few individuals successfully combined both genres, such as the Haarlem painter Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen (1575/77-1633). While Segers does not appear to have painted any seascapes, he did make several prints with marine subjects.2
Accurately rendering sailing ships presents a special challenge to printmakers. One of the earliest engravers, Master W with the Key (fl. c. 1465-90), already ventured a series of nine ships’ portraits in which he painstakingly attempted to render the complex interplay of the overlapping lines of the masts, sails and rigging (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-2014-30).3 Another aspect of ships at sea, namely the struggle against the elements, fascinated artists of old. The vulnerability and puniness of ships crossing immensely vast seas, exposed to the destructive forces of nature, constitutes a rewarding subject for artists. It is hardly surprising that with his keen eye for nature’s overwhelming power and man’s insignificance, so masterfully conveyed in his mountain landscapes, Segers would have been drawn to this subject.4
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
The attribution of a small frieze with ships (HB 50) remains beyond doubt: the etching exhibits all of the characteristics of Segers’s hand and is printed on prepared paper with a coloured ground and worked up with grey paint. Moreover, the two extant impressions come from the oldest, most important collections with prints by Segers, namely those of Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708) in Amsterdam (HB 50a, the present work) and Jacob Houbraken (1698-1780), now in the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden (HB 50b, inv. no. A 49378). Both impressions display the right and left half respectively of a frieze with thirty ships. In roughly the middle of the frieze is a three-master, which occurs in both impressions. This indicates that they are two impressions of the same plate and not two halves of a frieze that had been separated. The composition of the ground and the colouration with grey paint differs significantly in each impression. Both feature various types of ships, including barges, fishing vessels (herring boats), merchantmen and pinnaces (small warships).
Depictions of large numbers of ships usually portray naval battles or royal receptions, but this heterogeneously assembled fleet does not represent any specific historical event.22 The etching shows an active roadstead with all kinds of ships dropping anchor, making ready for departure, sailing away or drawing near.23 From his house on the Lindengracht, it was only a few minutes’ walk to the IJ estuary, where Segers could have seen sundry ships at anchor or under sail. He depicted the types of vessels and their rigging with great precision and with an eye for detail. However, one wonders whether Segers actually drew the vessels from life. The three-master in the middle that occurs in the impressions of both prints is an exact copy of the large ship in an anonymous woodcut now known to be after a design by Van Wieringen (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-6653).24 Moreover, the small ship in the left foreground of the impression in Dresden (HB 50b) is a repetition, in reverse, of the barge in the background of the same woodcut.
Segers obviously must have borrowed more ships from prints designed by specialists such as Van Wieringen. For instance, the large merchantman at the middle right in the impression in Amsterdam is suspiciously close to a ship by the Haarlem marine painter Hendrik Vroom (1562/63-1640) found in an engraving published in Amsterdam (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-80.496). This does not alter the fact that Segers must have been fascinated by ships. In addition to the small frieze, he also made a large etching of a ship, no complete impression of which has been preserved. Segers cut up the plate and used sections of it for three etchings of mountain landscapes. He did not polish out fragments of the bow, masts and rigging, but retained them as freakish elements in the landscapes (HB 8, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-819, HB 17, inv. no. RP-P-1951-528, and HB 21, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-825).25 The reconstruction of the original plate suggests it must have measured approximately 450 x 500 mm and contained an exceptionally large depiction of a ship. Segers probably cut the plate into pieces because something went amiss during the etching process. Some lines that are still visible in the landscapes were so deeply bitten that the ink remained in them while the etching was being printed and so all that shows is their edges.
There are two unique impressions of prints of ships that at first sight seem to have little in common with Segers’s etchings (HB 51a, Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, inv. no. A 49385; and HB 51b, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no. 442-119). They are a kind of outline etching executed entirely in line, without any tone or shadow. Segers’s hand, which can even be discerned in the fragments of ships in the cut plate, is entirely missing in these prints. Haverkamp-Begemann nevertheless retained the attribution to Segers of the print in Dresden (HB 51a), albeit somewhat hesitantly.26 An argument for the attribution is that the print includes two ships found in Segers’s small frieze: the ship on the far right in the outline etching in Dresden is identical to the abovementioned merchantman in the middle of the present impression (HB 50a). The flatter ship in the middle of the print in Dresden agrees with the ship on the right in the Amsterdam sheet. The same craft is also depicted on the right of the comparable line etching in Berlin (HB 51b). The latter also includes four vessels that occur in the small frieze as well.27 Both line etchings are thus derived from the same models, either preparatory studies or prints that have not survived.
There is a possibility that the two prints are very early works by the artist himself. However, they are quite stiffly and naively drawn, while even Segers’s earliest known works already exhibit his characteristic handling (e.g., HB 28 and HB 35). Despite the prints’ larger format, the rigging of the ships in both, moreover, is less detailed and convincingly depicted than in the small frieze (HB 50a and HB 50b). On the other hand, the etching in Dresden is printed in brown and the one in Berlin in grey, colours of ink rarely used by other seventeenth-century printmakers. An alternative scenario is that the prints were made by another printmaker after Segers’s drawings at his request. Both etchings look unfinished: the transition between the ships and the water on which they float is indicated with interrupted lines. This vague boundary between the water and the ship is connected to their function. They were more than likely meant to be entirely coloured in or overpainted.28 Both sheets look like precursors of the images in modern colouring books. Are we here dealing with the genesis of Segers’s 'print paintings'? Did he perhaps in the first instance have someone else make an etching for him to overpaint, only subsequently to pick up the etching needle himself in order to obtain better results? Whatever the case, their lacklustre execution excludes both prints as autograph works by Segers; they are to be considered anonymous prints after his design. Judging from its format and abrupt trimming on the left, a substantial part of the representation is missing in the sheet in Dresden (HB 51a). It, too, probably had a frieze format, comparable to the sheet in Berlin (HB 51b) or perhaps even the much more elongated, extensive composition of the small frieze (HB 50a and HB 50b).
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], 1829-30, no. 8; 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. 8; J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 56a (Die kleinen Schiffe) pl. XXXVIII; W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, pp. 29-30, 67; R. Grosse, Die holländische Landschaftskunst, 1600-1650, 2nd edn., Stuttgart 1925, p. 104; G. Knuttel Wzn., Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam [1941], p. 22; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, p. 36 (fig. 37); J. Houplain, ‘Sur les estampes d’Hercules Seghers‘, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, no. 49 (1957), p. 153; W. Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting of the 17th Century, London 1966, p. 112; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 50a (fig. 7) and pp. 39-40, 51 (incl. n. 88), 55 (n. 139); J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, no. 72b; F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, XXVI (Hercules Segers), no. 50a; 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 50a
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Frieze with Ships in a Roadstead [HB 50a], Amsterdam, c. 1615 - c. 1630', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37301
(accessed 10 November 2024 09:28:40).