Hercules Segers
? Amsterdam, c. 1625 - c. 1630
line etching with light crosshatching and stopping-out, printed in yellowish-white on paper prepared with a light brown ground that was then painted over with a dark brown paint
height c. 102 mm × width c. 170 mm (trimmed within the printed surface, except at top)
stamped on verso: lower right, with the mark of the City of Amsterdam (L. 11)
One state (unique impression).
Paper shows cockling and cracks in many places, probably due to the oil-based binding medium in the paint; losses at upper corners; a piece of circa 2 × 9 mm is missing along lower left edge and a piece of circa 6 × 31 mm in the centre; the pieces have been made up and coloured with grey paint; the lead-based yellowish-white (massicot) may originally have been lighter and has probably yellowed due to the oil varnish in this ink; 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-864
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
One might wonder why Segers portrayed mountains so frequently, and a stormy sea in only a couple of etchings, of which a mere two impressions are preserved (HB 48, the present work; and HB 49 in the Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. DG1933/2192r). Both etchings are printed in light ink on a dark ground, the technique par excellence for this subject. Segers also used it to render the structure of weathered rocks and stones, and it is perfect for depicting a churning sea in pale lines printed on a brown or black ground.
This etching (HB 48), of which the Rijksmuseum possesses the only known impression, includes one ship under full sail on a turbulent, though not extremely dangerous sea heading towards the horizon. At the boundary between the water and sky is a finely crosshatched strip, creating a hazy effect. The atmosphere of the etching in Vienna (HB 49), printed in yellowish-green on a black ground, is more ominous. In the darkness, three ships illuminated by a sinister light fight for their life on a roiling sea. Their hulls and riggings are partly etched and printed in light ink, and to a larger extent drawn with stopping-out varnish. In the unique impression in Vienna, the lines in stop-out are reserved in black in the yellowish-green ink. It remains difficult to understand why Segers applied a technique that created such a successful effect in only this one print (insofar as we know).22
Compared to the etching in Vienna, the execution of the present seascape is more elementary and the result less dramatic. Haverkamp-Begemann wrote the following about the pair of etchings: 'these prints are without precedence in the rendering of stormy weather, in the convincing representation of utter hopelessness for the ships that are at the mercy of the elements.'23 While it does indeed look bad for the three ships in the nocturnal storm in the Vienna print (HB 49), they have yet to perish. The ship in the middle is not sinking, as Haverkamp-Begemann thought, but plunging through a giant wave. Drifting in the foreground is a bale from one of the vessels. It could have been knocked overboard, but also deliberately cast into the sea to divert the whale on the right away from the ship. This trick was repeatedly described and often depicted (e.g. Rotterdam, Maritime Museum, inv. no. P328).24 Tiny passages were reserved in stopping-out varnish in the middle of the bale. Trautscholdt identified them as the letters H S and so claimed that the etching was Segers’s only signed print.25 Thus far it has not been possible to determine with certainty whether this is actually a monogram, or whether the resemblance of the spots to Segers’s initials is sheer coincidence.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 58 (Das Schiff auf bewegter See), pl. XX; W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, p. 83; G. Knuttel Wzn., Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam [1941], pp. 8, 29-56; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 35-37; E. Trautscholdt, ’Neues Bemühen um Hercules Seghers’, Imprimatur 12 (1954-55), p. 83; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 48, and pp. 39-40, 44, 54; J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, no. 69; 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. 48; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, p. 142 (fig. 182), Appendix 7, no. HB 48; 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 48
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Ship in Rough Water [HB 48], Amsterdam, c. 1625 - c. 1630', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37300
(accessed 13 November 2024 03:17:34).