Hercules Segers, after Adam Elsheimer, after Hendrick Goudt
? Amsterdam, c. 1630 - c. 1633
line etching with plate tone and highlights created by crosshatching and stopping-out; printed in olive green on paper; there is a small spot in the trees on the left where the ink failed to stick
height c. 202 mm × width c. 276 mm (trimmed on right and left sides within the printed surface)
stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (L. 240), partly on the verso of the print and partly on a strip of old paper (a fragment of a former mount)
One state. Watermark: foolscap with five points; similar to Laurentius, I, no. 508 (The Hague, 1633); completely identical, except for the bell on the front peak.
Loss at lower left corner made up and drawn in with green watercolour.
...; 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-796
Credit line: Transferred from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), 1816
Copyright: Public domain
Biblical Subjects
Only two works by Segers have been preserved in which human figures are the focus. Both are biblical scenes, freely copied after prints by other masters. Tobias and the Angel is inspired by an engraving of 1613 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-52.971) by Hendrick Goudt (c. 1583-1648),3 after a painting by Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610).4 The Lamentation of Christ is derived from a woodcut by Hans Baldung (c. 1484-1545) of a century earlier (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-4077).5
The two impressions of Tobias and the Angel, in Amsterdam and in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris (HB 1b, inv. no. 2368 LR), bear identical watermarks that can be dated circa 1633.6 Tobias and the Angel and The Lamentation belong to a small group of prints in which Segers created tone using a new and labour-intensive technique (cf. HB 12, inv. no. RP-P-OB-832; HB 18, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-804; HB 34, RP-P-OB-849; HB 41, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-857; and HB 42, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-858). This fact and the dating of the watermarks on both impressions of Tobias and the Angel indicate that they are late works by Segers, if not his last.
Segers's ambition to etch narrative scenes evidently manifested itself late, or was realized only towards the end of his life. In his landscapes, human figures play only a subsidiary role and, in general, are so small that it is difficult to determine how adept he was at drawing them.7 That his two narrative scenes and his only animal depiction (HB 52, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-865) rely strongly on prints by other artists suggests he was not particularly confident with figural subject-matter. The rendering of the figures in Segers’s religious prints closely follows their models, while their execution and technique differ entirely.
In terms of dating, style and technique, the works that served as Segers’s prototypes belong to two completely different realms. The print by Goudt is one of seven engravings he made after paintings by Elsheimer, a German artist whose work had caused a furore in Rome and became known in the North mainly through Goudt’s virtuoso reproductive prints. With their striking light effects and saturated blacks, these engravings are among the most influential prints of the seventeenth century and were also seminal for Rembrandt (1606-1669), and his development as an etcher. Thanks to Goudt’s prints, Elsheimer’s influence was felt by artists of Segers’s generation in Amsterdam and Haarlem, including Jan Pynas (c. 1581/82-1631) and his younger brother Jacob Pynas (1592-1650), and Rembrandt’s teacher Pieter Lastman (1583-1633), as emerges from Lastman's painting Tobias and the Angel of 1613 in the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (inv. no. S2006-031).8 In Haarlem, Jan van de Velde II (1593-1641) produced scores of prints resonating with the impact of Goudt’s engravings after Elsheimer, including a Tobias and the Angel of 1617 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1878-A-1749).9 In contrast to Segers, these artists did not literally adopt Elsheimer’s figures, but made variations of them.
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. 1589/90.10 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.11 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.12
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.13 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.14 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.15
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.16 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-?).17 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.18 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 1631.19 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).20 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.21 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.22
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’).23 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.24 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.25 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.26
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 Apocryphal Book of Tobit recounts how at the behest of his blind and dying father, Tobias travelled from Nineveh to Media. He was accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, who revealed his true identity only when they arrived home. At this time, Tobias cured his father’s blindness with the gall of a fish he had caught along the way with the help of his guardian angel. The biblical message of humbleness, trust in God and honesty propagated in the story of Tobit made it a popular subject among artists of all denominations.27
For his Tobit and the Angel, Segers used an engraving by Hendrick Goudt (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-52.971) as a model. Segers’s etching shows Goudt’s original composition in reverse, with Tobias (dragging a large fish) and his companion walking from right to left against a background of a forest landscape with a panoramic distant view. The prints differ in many other respects. Segers used a somewhat larger copper-plate than Goudt, enlarged the figures with respect to the landscape and placed them higher in the foreground and descending at an angle.28 The middle ground, which features a lake in Goudt’s print, is filled with trees and a path winding into the distance in Segers’s version. The most important deviation from Elsheimer’s composition, however, is the elimination of the woods behind the figures, so that their silhouettes stand out freely against an empty sky. Segers did, however, faithfully borrow some details from Goudt’s print, such as the snail and the lizard in the foreground.
Goudt produced his various grey tones and intense black by cutting a network of delicate crosshatching directly into the plate with a burin, and reserving areas of white,29 while Segers crosshatched a very fine network in the thin etching ground and thereby achieved an even more subtle structure. He then drew the light areas and highlights in the figures and in the landscape with the fine tip of a pen or brush dipped in stopping-out varnish, which he also used to cover the upper part of the sky. The border of the stopping ground can be discerned in the sky above the trees at left and in the wing of the angel at right. The stopping-out varnish eroded the etching ground; and the mordant bit several lines, a phenomenon found more frequently in Segers’s later prints (e.g. HB 2, inv. no. RP-P-OB-797, and HB 34, inv. no. RP-P-OB-849). After etching the tone, Segers covered the plate with a new etching ground in which he drew the figures and the landscape. The result is more delicate than in any other print Segers executed in the same technique. The refinement in the representation of trees is unparalleled in seventeenth-century printmaking.30
The two surviving impressions of this plate are both printed in olive green. The tone of the impression in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris (HB 1b, inv. no. 2368 LR), is a shade darker than the one in Amsterdam.31 The sky in both is covered with plate tone that was partly wiped away around the figures and areas of trees. In the Paris impression, the vertical bands of leftover ink give the impression of a rain shower. For the rest, the impressions are virtually identical and, as such, are exceptional in Segers’s extant work.
At some point Segers’s plate came into the possession of Rembrandt, who rigorously reworked it circa 1652 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-116).32 Rembrandt scraped away Tobias and the angel and the trees on their left and right. In their place, he added a depiction of Joseph and the Virgin Mary on the Flight into Egypt and some trees in etching and drypoint. The wing, head, sleeve and staff of Segers’s angel can still be discerned in the middle tree. Judging by the number of times Rembrandt represented the story of Tobit, the subject must have been dear to him, but he evidently felt that Segers’s figures were not up to snuff. By replacing them with a much smaller figure group on a donkey, Rembrandt came closer to Elsheimer’s original composition, in which the figures are surrounded by trees rather than rising above them.
Goudt’s Flight into Egypt after Elsheimer (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-52.972) is similarly built up and Rembrandt may have had this nocturnal scene in mind when he chose the same subject to replace Segers’s interpretation of Elsheimer’s Tobias.33 Subtler, yet equally telling are Rembrandt’s interventions in the landscape. He largely eliminated the trees behind the figures (even though traces of some of them, such as the cypress-like one to the left of Tobias, are still visible) and replaced them with sketchier types of trees. By reinforcing the passages of shade in the foreground and in the wooded landscape at left, Rembrandt heightened the contrast and the volume of the areas of trees. Segers’s delicate structures were sacrificed to create a more readable and varied woodland landscape. Rembrandt’s alterations were primarily aimed at defining elements in the landscape more clearly. For instance, he enlarged the river in the background by polishing out trees and enhancing the banks with drypoint. He also reinforced the mountains in the background. Surprisingly, Rembrandt did not touch the irregularities in Segers’s plate, such as the traces of foul biting in the sky and above the group of trees at the left. He removed only the beginnings of a cloud in the middle of the sky.
Impressions of the plate after Rembrandt’s first reworking are extremely rare: only two are known, both on costly vellum; one in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1848,0911.31), the other in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 2370 LR). Of the third state, after the addition of a few details in drypoint, only a single impression is known, also kept in the Louvre (inv. no. 2371 LR). After Rembrandt’s further reworking of the trees and background in etching, more prints were pulled and disseminated. The etching is not signed.
Revising an etching plate by another artist is unique in Rembrandt’s oeuvre, and rare in the work of other artists. One wonders about the extent to which art lovers and collectors of Rembrandt’s etchings recognized that the print was not entirely by him, but rather a unique curiosity in which stylistic features and techniques of two printmakers come together.34.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
E. Dutuit, Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, 6 vols., Paris and London 1881-88, V (1882; Rembrandt), no. 61 (incl. n. 1); J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 1a (fig. XXXXV); Dutch Art, 1450-1900: Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of Dutch Art, exh. cat. London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1930, no. 808; G. Knuttel Wzn., Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam [1941], pp. 12, 32-33; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 89, 91-93; E. Haverkamp Begemann (ed.), Hercules Seghers, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boymans) 1954, no. 11; J. Held, Adam Elsheimer: Werk, künstlerische Herkunft und Nachfolge, exh. cat. Frankfurt-am-Main (Städelsches Kunstinstitut) 1966-67, no. 295; J. Verbeek, Hercules Seghers en zijn voorlopers, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1967, no. 1; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 1a, also pp. 29-30, 43-44, 53, 55; F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, XVIII-XIX (1969; Rembrandt), no. 56 and XXVI (1981; Segers), no. 1a; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, p. 145, and Appendix 7, no. HB 1a; C. Schneider et al., Rembrandt’s Landscapes: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. Washington, DC (National Gallery of Art) 1990, no. 40a; P. van der Coelen et al., Patriarchs, Angels and Prophets: The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmaking from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 1996, no. 48; C. White, Rembrandt as an Etcher: A Study of the Artist at Work, 2nd edn., New Haven and elsewhere 1999, pp. 245-49; E. Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/London (British Museum) 2000, no. 71; C.S. Ackley et al., Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher, exh. cat. Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago) 2003-04, nos. 14-15; E. Hinterding, Rembrandt Etchings from the Frits Lugt Collection, 2 vols., Bussum and Paris 2008, no. 43; E. Hinterding and J. Rutgers (comp.), The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700: Rembrandt, 7 vols., Ouderkerk aan den IJssel 2013, no. 271 (for the states and impressions of the plate reworked by Rembrandt); 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 1a
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Tobias and the Angel [HB 1a], Amsterdam, c. 1630 - c. 1633', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37241
(accessed 20 September 2024 14:50:08).