Object data
oil, over a sketch in black chalk, on paper prepared with an opaque, dark grey-blue ground
height 176 mm × width 291 mm
Hercules Segers
? Amsterdam, c. 1618 - c. 1622
oil, over a sketch in black chalk, on paper prepared with an opaque, dark grey-blue ground
height 176 mm × width 291 mm
stamped on verso: at lower right, with the mark of the City of Amsterdam (L. 11)
Small tear at upper left, with old restoration; brown and grey spots over entire sheet; the verso of the paper is light brown due from the oil-based binding agent in the ground having permeated the support.
...; collection Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708), Amsterdam;1 by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam (L. 11), 1708; on loan to the museum (L. 2228a), since 1885
Object number: RP-T-H-00-251
Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
Segers’s representations of mountain landscapes, trees, vegetation and buildings seem to be more a matter of imagination, intuition and spontaneity than of painstaking observation and study of nature. Illustrative are two sheets belonging to the group of forty-two works by Segers from the Hinloopen collection in the Rijksmuseum (P 18, inv. no. RP-T-H-00-250; and P 19, the present work). They are not printed, but rather painted in oil and may have been part of the working material from Segers’s workshop that entered the seventeenth-century collection of Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708). Explored on the sheets in loose brushstrokes are the motifs that Segers would later work out in three etchings (HB 23-24 and HB 36).2 Only two such oil sketches by Segers are known. The extent to which they are representative of the way in which he conceived his landscapes and executed his etchings, and possibly his paintings as well, is thus difficult to determine.
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. 1589/90.3 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.4 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.5
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.6 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.7 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.8
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.9 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-?).10 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.11 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 1631.12 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).13 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.14 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.15
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’).16 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.17 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.18 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.19
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 composition of this oil sketch largely corresponds with the etching Farm Building Surrounded by Trees and a Fence, of which only a single impression is preserved (HB 36, Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, inv. no. A.49377). It shows the road, the fence and the house surrounded by trees more or less in reverse, but without the figure that looms up like a phantom on the left in the sketch. In a second phase – and probably later – Segers introduced areas of shadow in drypoint in the road and the fencing on the right in the etching. The unique impression in blue ink on pink-prepared paper belongs to a group of prints Segers pulled in the same color combination, and probably at the same time. A transparent layer of green paint was applied in rapid brushstrokes over the entire landscape. This may be the beginning of an alteration in which the sky would ultimately be colored as well. The print shares its partly finished state with impressions of other etchings on a pink ground.20 Very comparable to the oil sketch and the print is the etching Road near a Farm House Surrounded by Trees and a Fence, of which a unique impression is preserved in the British Museum, London (HB 37, inv. no. S.5532).
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, p. 25, no. 19; E. Haverkamp Begemann (ed.), Hercules Seghers, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boymans) 1954, no. 32; J.Q. van Regteren Altena, 'Hercules Seghers en de topografie', Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 3 (1955), no. 1, p. 3; K.G. Boon, 'Een notitie op een Seghers-prent uit de verzameling Hinloopen', Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 8 (1960), no. 1, p. 5; J. Verbeek, Hercules Seghers en zijn voorlopers, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1967, no. T. 1, pl. 63; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, under no. 32 (fig. 6); J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, p. 36, under no. 67; M. Schapelhouman and P. Schatborn, Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: Artists Born between 1580 and 1600, 2 vols., coll. cat. Amsterdam 1998, no. 290; 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. P 19
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Farm Building Surrounded by Trees with a Figure near a Fence [P 19], Amsterdam, c. 1618 - c. 1622', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.60470
(accessed 10 November 2024 12:37:23).