Hercules Segers
Amsterdam, c. 1625 - c. 1630
line etching, additions in drypoint, supplemented with plate tone, printed in blue on thick paper; with pink and blue oil paint; framing line in brown ink; plate tone has been rubbed away entirely in the lightest sections
height c. 225 mm × width c. 489 mm (trimmed within the plate mark, approx. 25 mm at top and bottom and on left and right)
Second state of two (additions in drypoint in the foreground, including the shadows under the fencing on the right and in the center around and on the tree stump and the bands of shadows across the fields, in particular on the left and on the rocks at left and right).
Tear, restored, at top right to the left of the tree; the oil paint used to colour the sky has permeated the paper and coloured it brown in parts.
...; 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-840
Credit line: Transferred from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague), 1816
Copyright: Public domain
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).3
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).4 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.5
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.6 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.7 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).8 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.9 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.10 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.11 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.12 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
Hercules Segers (Haarlem c. 1589/90 - ? 1633/40)
No baptismal record has been found, but he was probably born in Haarlem in c. 1589/90.13 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.14 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.15
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.16 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.17 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.18
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.19 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-?).20 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.21 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 1631.22 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).23 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.24 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.25
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’).26 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.27 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.28 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.29
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
Of all of the large mountain landscapes (HB 3-6), the Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields (HB 6) survives in the most impressions, namely six, all of which differ markedly from one another. The motif of the rocks at left and the repoussoir device of a fence screening a path also seem to be derived from a print after Bruegel (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-7364). However, this is the least Bruegelian of the four large mountain landscape prints. The rocky outcropping is here at the side, and a distant view in a flat valley largely occupies the rest of the composition. Despite the low horizon, there is a great sense of depth thanks to a virtually endless succession of pastures and fields enclosed by fences, paths, tiny houses and boscages. These can be distinguished most clearly in the crispest and most complete impression, now in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (inv. no. A 49388). Of all of Segers’s known etchings, moreover, this one is coloured in the greatest detail.30
The detailed colouring focuses attention on elements in the landscape that might otherwise be missed, for instance, the many houses with red roofs, the area of water at the left showing up as bright blue, and the two tiny figures on the left.31 The colouring makes it clear that they are women engaged in a specific activity: the left one, wearing a red skirt and cap, blue apron and white jacket, holds a bag, while the right one, with a blue skirt and a red jacket, extends her hand and seems to be sowing the ploughed field before the cottage. This kind of activity, done by farmers at first light, accords with the early morning suggested by the colouring of the sky and landscape.
The contrast with the impressions of the second state printed in blue, two in the Rijksmuseum (HB 6 II d, the present work and HB 6 II e inv. no. RP-P-OB-841, and one in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (HB 6 II f, inv. no. 103-1880), is great. The areas of shade in drypoint in the foreground and the horizontal bands throughout the landscape deviate from the shadows done in brush in the above-mentioned impression in Dresden, and yet they are remarkably effective in creating depth. An evening mood seems to dominate the impression in Berlin, while in the present impression (HB 6 II d), in which the sky is coloured with pink and blue oil paint, night seems to be falling.32 The second Amsterdam impression (HB 6 II e), printed with an abundance of plate tone, with the sky coloured with streaks of blue watercolour, can practically be considered a nocturnal scene. The above-mentioned 'maculature' impression in London (HB 6 I b, inv. no. S.5534) and the one printed in brown, formerly in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, and presumed destroyed (HB 6 I c, inv. no. 9412), are more difficult to interpret as specific times of the day or moods.
The question that arises is whether Segers intended for buyers to purchase multiple impressions and to compare them. Print series of the Four Times of Day, the Four Seasons, or the Twelve Months were tremendously popular.33 Only two of the six known impressions of the Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields, however, appear to have the same provenance.34
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. 18 (Die grosse Landschaft mit dem Knüppelgeländer); 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. 18; J.P. van der Kellen, Afbeeldingen naar belangrijke prenten en teekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet Amsterdam/Reproductions d’après des estampes et des dessins importants du Cabinet des estampes à Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1908, pl. 61; J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 29a; W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, pp. 64-65, 88; W. Steenhoff, Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam and Paris 1924, pl. 20; R. Grosse, Die holländische Landschaftskunst, 1600-1650, 2nd edn., Stuttgart 1925, p. 103; G. Knuttel Wzn., Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam [1941], pp. 9, 51; W. van Leusden, Het grafisch-technisch probleem van de etsen van Hercules Seghers, Utrecht 1960, p. 11; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 6 II d, pp. 30-31, 39, 44-45, 47, 54-55; J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, no. 6; I.M. de Groot, Landschappen. Etsen van de Nederlandse meesters uit de zeventiende eeuw, Amsterdam 1979, no. 39; 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. 6 II d; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, p. 139 (fig. 179, detail of X-ray image) and Appendix 7, no. HB 6 II d; 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 6 II d
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields [HB 6 II d], 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.37305
(accessed 20 September 2024 12:00:48).