The Mossy Tree [HB 32]

One state (unique impression).

Missing corner at upper right made up with paper coloured grey¹¹Cf. the old repairs of a similar nature on HB 33 (inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-848) and HB 48 (inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-864).; horizontal tear at lower left; the ground has cracked here and in other places; laid down on an eighteenth-century (?) album sheet; darker spotting due to the oil-based binding medium in the blue colouring having permeated the paper, especially at top, visible despite mounting.

...; collection Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708), Amsterdam;²²According to L. 11. by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam (L. 11), 1708; from which on loan to the museum (L. 2228a), since 1885

ObjectNumber: RP-P-H-OB-847

Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam

Trees and Woods

Segers’s teacher, the Protestant landscapist Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1606/07), fled besieged Antwerp in 1585 and stopped in Middelburg before finding his way to Frankenthal, where he played a seminal role in the development of a new artistic genre: the independent monumental forest scene.³³For Van Coninxloo and the forest landscape, see H. G. Franz, 'Der Landschaftsmaler Gilles van Coninxloo', in E.J. Hürkey (ed.), Kunst, Kommerz, Glaubenskampf: Frankenthal um 1600, exh. cat. Frankenthal (Erkenbert-Museum) 1995, pp. 103-13; B. Brauksiepe, 'Von A=Alsloot bis Z=Zapponi: Das künstlerische Erbe des Gillis van Coninxloo, eine Spurensuche', in ibid., pp. 114-31; C. Levesque, 'Nature Discerned: Providence and Perspective in Gilles van Coninxloo’s Sylva', Intersections 20 (2011), pp. 123-48. Even though his influence was great, Van Coninxloo was not the sole inventor of this landscape type. In the development of the forest landscape, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) and Paul Bril (1553-1626) played leading roles. At the Rubenianum, Elise Boutsen is conducting research on the Brabant painters in Frankenthal and the development of the forest landscape (see '"Seeing the wood for the trees": Introducing Project Associate Elise Boutsen and Patron Eric Le Jeune', The Rubenianum Quarterly (2015), no. 3, p. 2). The trees and groves that initially served mainly as repoussoirs for sweeping panoramas became Van Coninxloo’s principal subject. His pictures met with great success, and he even received commissions from Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612). He settled in Amsterdam in 1595 and earnt a reputation as an innovative landscape painter. In his Schilder-boeck (1604), Karel van Mander (1548-1606) praised Van Coninxloo as the best 'landscapist' ('landtschap-maker') of his time. His work was widely followed in Holland, and, with a wink to his speciality, Van Mander noted facetiously that the trees that had fairly withered in Dutch painting were now growing to great heights following his model.⁴⁴K. van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, ed. by H. Miedema, 2 vols., Utrecht 1973, fol. 268r, ll, pp. 37-43. After the death of his teacher at the end of 1606 or the beginning of 1607, Segers did not develop into an explicit specialist in forest landscapes, although he did practice the genre, albeit on a modest scale and format.

Closely related to works by Van Coninxloo, in terms of both the compositions and the depictions of trees, are three prints of trees and woods by Segers (HB 35-37), as well as the small forest scene on canvas in a private collection in Norway attributed to Segers in 2016 (P 1).⁵⁵H. 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 1. Although they differ in format and execution, the layout of the three etchings agrees: our eye is led from the foreground along a road to a house or farmstead. Two impressions of the smallest etching were printed on cloth prepared with a pale grey and a pale brown priming (HB 35a, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-852; and HB 35b, British Museum, London, inv. no S.5224). Segers used exactly the same combination for two impressions of the small Landscape with an Oak Tree and a Distant View (HB 28a, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-850; and HB 28b, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-851).

An oil sketch with a road and a house encircled by trees (inv. no. RP-T-H-00-251) is also difficult to read. It may have been part of the working material from Segers’s workshop that – like his only other extant oil sketch (inv. no. RP-T-H-00-250) – entered the collection of Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708). The composition of the oil sketch largely corresponds with an etching (HB 36, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden, inv. no. A 49377), of which only a single impression is preserved. 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.⁶⁶HB 19 II c, HB 47 II e and HB 47 II g-h. See also HB 38-47.

Very comparable to the oil sketch and the print mentioned above 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). It is printed in black on paper prepared with a thin greyish-yellow ground. In combination with the ground, the fine lines and burr of the drypoint have turned brown. These passages of shadow are not drawn with a pen or brush, as has often been assumed.⁷⁷See J. Verbeek, Hercules Seghers en zijn voorlopers, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1967, no. E, pl. 57. With their round leaves and stereotypical tree trunks, Segers’s previously discussed forest scenes look simple compared to the richly forested landscape prints by his contemporaries, such as Willem Buytewech (1591/92-1624) or Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630). And yet Segers’s sizeable etching, with its expressive and differentiated rendering of tree trunks, branches and leaves, is virtually unparalleled in seventeenth-century printmaking.⁸⁸Segers’s prints anticipate the etchings of trees that Jacob van Ruisdael (1629/30-1681) and Claes van Beresteyn (1617-1684) created some twenty years later. For Van Ruisdael, see S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven and London 2001, nos. E7-E9; for Van Beresteyn, see C.S. Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/St Louis (Art Museum) 1981, no. 153.

Huigen Leeflang, 2016

Moss-covered branches and trees are a recurring motif in Segers’s etchings. The most striking example is the present work, which speaks to the imagination and is indeed one of his most iconic prints.²⁶²⁶Reproductions of the print graced the covers of the following publications: W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922; M. Bisanz-Prakken et al., Ontmoetingen. Meesterwerken van teken- en prentkunst uit de Albertina in Wenen en het Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam/Begegnungen: Meisterwerke der Zeichnung und Durckgraphik aus dem Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam und der Albertina in Wien, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Vienna (Albertina) 1989; and the exhibition poster of the show in the Rijksmuseum to mark the publication of J. Van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988. It is done in lift-ground technique and printed in green ink on pale pink-prepared paper. The ink seems slightly browned. At the top and bottom, the paper was colored with transparent blue paint, which is increasingly more thinly applied towards the middle. Together with the pink ground, this creates an iridescent effect.

The question of whether Segers depicted existing flora or whether the 'tree' is a figment of his imagination has been subject to a fair amount of speculation.²⁷²⁷For a summary, see E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, pp. 34-36 (under no. 32). It has been identified as a spruce and a larch tree. Pine trees with drooping, mossy branches feature frequently in etchings and paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480-1538) and other artists of the so-called Danube School (e.g. the colored etching in the Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. DG1923/1779).²⁸²⁸For example, see S. Roller and J. Sander, Fantastiche Welten: Albrecht Altdorfer und das Expresive in der Kunst um 1500, exh. cat. Frankfurt-am-Main (Städel Museum)/Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum) 2015, nos. 50-51, 55, 57-60, 65-68, 72 and 75. See also 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, p. 73 (n. 141). Segers may well have been inspired by the strange vegetation in such early sixteenth-century German prints. However, drooping, moss-covered branches also occur in paintings by Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) and his followers, including Segers’s fellow artist and townsman Jacob Pynas (1592-1650).²⁹²⁹E. Haverkamp-Begemann (Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, pp. 34-35) suggested that the influence of Altdorfer and contemporaries of Segers may have been indirect, via Elsheimer and his followers, for whom prints and drawings of the Danube School would have been a source of inspiration.

It has been suggested that trees in Chinese scroll paintings served as models for Segers, but this notion is based on vague associations with Asian art rather than any concrete example and seems to be literally far-fetched. Segers did not have to draw on art by others per se for his fanciful trees and branches. Beard lichen, or old man’s beard (Unsea), which grows in damp woodlands on dead or dying trees in the Netherlands and elsewhere, sometimes assume shapes that look as though they came straight out of Segers’s etchings.³⁰³⁰Much gratitude to Dr Ferry Bouman (Faculty of Science, Amsterdam University) for his expert identification of the overgrowth in Segers’s Mossy Tree as beard lichen. Segers’s treatment of such a natural phenomenon as an independent subject and his astonishing technique makes The Mossy Tree unique among seventeenth-century works of art. In fact, what is depicted is not a tree or a trunk, but rather a series of calligraphically built-up mossy branches connected only with thin lines, which seem to float before the softly colored background.

Huigen Leeflang, 2016

J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 37 (Die bemooste Tanne), pl. LXV; 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. XXXIII; W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, pp. 69, 80, 88; R. Grosse, Die holländische Landschaftskunst, 1600-1650, 2nd edn., Stuttgart 1925, pp. 45, 104, 122; J. Poortenaar, Hollandsche etsers van de gouden eeuw, Amsterdam 1938 (fig. 76); G. Knuttel Wzn., Hercules Seghers, Amsterdam [1941], pp. 46-48; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 99-100 (fig. 130); E. Trautscholdt, 'Neues Bemühen um Hercules Seghers', Imprimatur 12 (1954-55), p. 84; K.G. Boon, 'Hercules Seghers (1589/90-1638). De Poort, De Larix', Openbaar Kunstbezit 1 (1957), no. 30a; E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 32 and pp. 34-36, 44, 55; J. Rowlands, Hercules Segers, Amsterdam 1979, no. 32; I.M. de Groot, Landschappen. Etsen van de Nederlandse meesters uit de zeventiende eeuw, Amsterdam 1979, no. 44; 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. 32; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, pp. 148-49 (fig. 196); 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 32

H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, The Mossy Tree [HB 32], 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.37287